Archive for the ‘Reference’ Category

Book offer: scholarly grammars of English

June 25, 2025

These can go to the Friends of the Palo Alto Library, but it occurs to me that among my friends and colleagues (I will also post this offer to Stanford Linguistics) there might be someone who would like a full set of one or more of these great scholarly grammars of English:

(paperback) Jespersen, Modern English Grammar (7 volumes), plus The Philosophy of Grammar

(hardback) Kruisinga, Handbook of Present-Day English (5 volumes)

(hardback) Poutsma, A Grammar of Late Modern English (4 volumes)

I don’t have the resources to mail stuff, so you have to be able to pick things up at my Palo Alto house (if you don’t live too far away, I have helpful family members who could deliver).

Arnold (there are other, less scholarly, offers to follow)

(inquiries to: arnold dot zwicky at-sign gmail dot com)

 

 

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Journalistic conventions

June 23, 2015

Practice 1. Newspaper and magazine stories often have a human-interest lead-in, about a specific person or group involved in the story; that’s designed to engage the readers’ interest, before the real subject of the piece, the hard news or analysis, kicks in.

(I’m not sure how old this practice is, but it’s now very common, even though some critics find it objectionable.)

Practice 2. A convention of newspaper journalism is that on first appearance, someone is introduced with a full name and and a brief characterization (“john Smith, the victim of the crime”), but that later mentions will use Prefix + LN (or just LN), with no recharacterization (“Mr. Smith”, “Professor Smith”, “Smith”). This convention is designed for economy (“Omit Needless Words”), but it diverges from the usual practices of story-telling (also adopted by many writers of non-fiction), where people are re-introduced into the discourse if they have dropped from topicality,

The two practices taken together can make newspaper stories hard to follow. A case in point, from “The right choices: America’s bloated prison system has stopped growing. Now it must shrink” in The Economist of 6/20.

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