A woman finds love and closure, and rediscovers herself, when she returns to her roots in the enchanting new novel from the author of The Irresistible Blueberry Bakeshop & Café. Newly jobless, newly single, and suddenly apartmentless, writer Grace Hammond has come unmoored. A grammar whiz who's brilliant at correcting other people's errors, she hasn't yet found quite the right set of rules for fixing her own mistakes. Desperate to escape the city and her trifecta of problems, Grace hits pause and retreats to her Connecticut hometown. What begins as a short visit with her parents quickly becomes a far more meaningful stay, though, as she discovers that the answers to what her future holds might be found by making peace with -- and even embracing -- the past. As Grace sets out to change her ways and come to terms, finally, with the tragedy that took her older sister's life so many years ago, she rekindles a romance with her high school sweetheart, Peter, now a famous Hollywood director who's filming a movie in town. Sparks also fly at the local bike shop, where Grace's penchant for pointing out what's wrong rattles the owner's ruggedly handsome schoolteacher son, Mitch. Torn between the promise of a glamorous life and the allure of the familiar, Grace must decide what truly matters -- and whether it's time for her to throw away the rule book and bravely follow her heart.

“Babel is an endlessly interesting book, and you don’t have to have any linguistic training to enjoy it . . . it’s just so much fun to read.” —NPR English is the world language, except that 80 percent of the world doesn’t speak it. Linguist Gaston Dorren calculates that to speak fluently with half of the world’s people in their mother tongues, you’d need to know no fewer than twenty languages. In Babel, he sets out to explore these top twenty world languages, which range from the familiar (French, Spanish) to the surprising (Malay, Javanese, Bengali). Whisking readers along on a delightful journey, he traces how these languages rose to greatness while others fell away, and shows how speakers today handle the foibles of their mother tongues. Whether showcasing tongue-tying phonetics, elegant but complicated writing scripts, or mind-bending quirks of grammar, Babel vividly illustrates that mother tongues are like nations: each has its own customs and beliefs that seem as self-evident to those born into it as they are surprising to outsiders. Babel reveals why modern Turks can’t read books that are a mere 75 years old, what it means in practice for Russian and English to be relatives, and how Japanese developed separate “dialects” for men and women. Dorren also shares his experiences studying Vietnamese in Hanoi, debunks ten myths about Chinese characters, and discovers the region where Swahili became the lingua franca. Witty and utterly fascinating, Babel will change how you look at and listen to the world. “Word nerds of every strain will enjoy this wildly entertaining linguistic study.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Six thousand years. Sixty languages. One “brisk and breezy” whirlwind armchair tour of Europe “bulg[ing] with linguistic trivia” (The Wall Street Journal). Take a trip of the tongue across the continent in this fascinating, hilarious and highly edifying exploration of the many ways and whys of Euro-speaks—its idiosyncrasies, its histories, commonalities, and differences. Most European languages are descended from a single ancestor, a language not unlike Sanskrit known as Proto-Indo-European (or PIE for short), but the continent’s ever-changing borders and cultures have given rise to a linguistic and cultural diversity that is too often forgotten in discussions of Europe as a political entity. Lingo takes us into today’s remote mountain villages of Switzerland, where Romansh is still the lingua franca, to formerly Soviet Belarus, a country whose language was Russified by the Bolsheviks, to Sweden, where up until the 1960s polite speaking conventions required that one never use the word “you.” “In this bubbly linguistic endeavor, journalist and polyglot Dorren thoughtfully walks readers through the weird evolution of languages” (Publishers Weekly), and not just the usual suspects—French, German, Yiddish, irish, and Spanish, Here, too are the esoteric—Manx, Ossetian, Esperanto, Gagauz, and Sami, and that global headache called English. In its sixty bite-sized chapters, Dorret offers quirky and hilarious tidbits of illuminating facts, and also dispels long-held lingual misconceptions (no, Eskimos do not have 100 words for snow). Guaranteed to change the way you think about language, Lingo is a “lively and insightful . . . unique, page-turning book” (Minneapolis Star Tribune).

Literary criticism often includes ad hoc comments about onomatopoeia, synaesthesia, or other forms of iconism. In A Grammar of Iconism, Earl Anderson discusses these phenomena systematically. According to Anderson, modern post-Saussurian linguistics has as its central tenet the arbitrariness of linguistic signs. Thus, linguistic elements that bear some relationship to their referent have been seen as marginal to the system of language, or at best similar in their arbitrariness to other linguistic signs. As an example of the latter, while most languages have an onomatopoeic element, different languages imitate sounds differently. Anderson argues against the standard view, provides a detailed critique of the negative arguments against iconism, and offers a positive typology that demonstrates the extensiveness and complexity of iconism in language.

Spiritual Grammar identifies a genre of religious literature that until now has not been recognized as such. In this surprising and theoretically nuanced study, F. Dominic Longo reveals how grammatical structures of language addressed in two medieval texts published nearly four centuries apart, from distinct religious traditions, offer a metaphor for how the self is embedded in spiritual reality. Reading The Grammar of Hearts (Nahw al-qulūb) by the great Sufi shaykh and Islamic scholar 'Abd al-Karīm al-Qushayrī (d. 1074) and Moralized Grammar (Donatus moralizatus) by Christian theologian Jean Gerson (d. 1429), Longo reveals how both authors use the rules of language and syntax to advance their pastoral goals. Indeed, grammar provides the two masters with a fresh way of explaining spiritual reality to their pupils and to discipline the souls of their readers in the hopes that their writings would make others adept in the grammar of the heart.

This book advances research on grammatical change and shows the breadth and liveliness of the field. International scholars report on the nature and outcomes of all aspects of syntactic change, including grammaticalization, variation, syntactic movement, determiner-phrase syntax, pronominal systems, case systems, negation, and alignment.

'Christopher Hall's book is the best new introduction to linguistics that I have seen in decades. It is engagingly written without talking down to the reader and it covers all the subparts of the field in a comprehensive and even-handed manner. I plan to use it the next time that I teach an introductory course at Washington.' Professor Frederick J. Newmeyer, University of Washington 'With apt examples from novels and newspapers, courtroom trials and telephone conversations, the lowly and the mighty, his book repeatedly startles as it casts light on language. This is a bright, humorous, and completely accessible tour of 21st-century linguistics.' Professor Edward Finegan, University of Southern California This book introduces the fundamentals of human language from a linguistic point of view, using examples drawn from everyday life to aid comprehension, and encouraging critical thinking throughout. Besides presenting the fundamental building blocks of language and explaining how these function, the book also introduces other key elements of the discipline of linguistics, including language acquisition, applied linguistics, psycholinguistics and discourse analysis. Packed full of examples, this is the ideal introduction to language for those who are interested in studying linguistics, have already started a course, or just want to study at home.