A page-turning, existential romp through the life and times of the world's most polarizing punctuation mark. The semicolon. Stephen King, Hemingway, Vonnegut, and Orwell detest it. Herman Melville, Henry James, and Rebecca Solnit love it. But why? When is it effective? Have we been misusing it? Should we even care? In [this book, the author] charts the rise and fall of this infamous punctuation mark, which for years was the trendiest one in the world...

The ability to recognize and correctly use the different parts of speech is key to demonstrating command of the conventions of standard English grammar and usage when writing or speaking. In this book, readers will learn about the function pronouns have in sentences by following the story of Sam and his visiting cousins, Jim and Anna. The story and supplemental activity sidebars help teach concepts such as tense, correct punctuation, relative pronouns,...

The ability to recognize and correctly use the different parts of speech is key to demonstrating command of the conventions of standard English grammar and usage when writing or speaking. In this book, readers will learn about the function verbs have in sentences by following the story of Will and his new puppy, Brownie. The story and supplemental activity sidebars help teach concepts such as tense, use of regular and irregular verbs, and the difference...

Construction Grammar (CxG) has developed into a broad and highly diverse family of approaches that have in common that they see constructions, i.e. form-meaning pairs at various levels of abstraction and complexity, as the basic units of language. This Element gives an overview of the origin and the current state of the art of constructionist approaches, focusing, on the one hand, on basic concepts like the notion of 'constructions', while at the...