Grammar by Diagram, second edition is a book designed for anyone who wishes to improve grammatical understanding and skill. Using traditional sentence diagraming as a visual tool, the book explains how to expand simple sentences into compound, complex, and compound-complex sentences, and how to employ verbals (infinitives, gerunds, and participles) and other structures for additional variety. The text addresses the most frequent usage errors by explaining how to distinguish between adjectives and adverbs; how to avoid problems of pronoun case, agreement, and consistency; how to ensure that verbs will agree with their subjects and will be appropriate in terms of tense, aspect, voice, and mood; and how to phrase sentences to avoid errors in parallelism or placement of modifiers. Six appendices incorporate further exercises, a summary of key basics from the text, and supplemental material not included in the body of the text but useful for quick reference. This new edition includes additional exercises and has been revised and updated throughout.

This book is about building computer programs that parse (analyze, or diagram) sentences of a real-world English. The English we are concerned with might be a corpus of everyday, naturally-occurring prose, such as the entire text of this morning's newspaper. Most programs that now exist for this purpose are not very successful at finding the correct analysis for everyday sentences. In contrast, the programs described here make use of a more successful statistically-driven approach. Our book is, first, a record of a five-year research collaboration between IBM and Lancaster University. Large numbers of real-world sentences were fed into the memory of a program for grammatical analysis (including a detailed grammar of English) and processed by statistical methods. The idea is to single out the correct parse, among all those offered by the grammar, on the basis of probabilities. Second, this is a how-to book, showing how to build and implement a statistically-driven broad-coverage grammar of English. We even supply our own grammar, with the necessary statistical algorithms, and with the knowledge needed to prepare a very large set (or corpus) of sentences so that it can be used to guide the statistical processing of the grammar's rules.

This bestselling textbook provides an engaging and user-friendly introduction to the study of language. Assuming no prior knowledge of the subject, Yule presents information in bite-sized sections, clearly explaining the major concepts in linguistics – from how children learn language to why men and women speak differently, through all the key elements of language. This fifth edition has been revised and updated with new figures and tables, additional topics, and numerous new examples using languages from across the world. To increase student engagement and to foster problem-solving and critical thinking skills, the book includes thirty new tasks. An expanded and revised online study guide provides students with further resources, including answers and tutorials for all tasks, while encouraging lively and proactive learning. This is the most fundamental and easy-to-use introduction to the study of language.