Books
Lewin, Beverly, Writing readable research. London: Equinox, 2010. Pp. xii+193. ISBN 978-1-904-76855-5 (pbk).
This book tries to help users create texts that are easy to read, interesting and dynamic, yet conform to current standards of English, to criteria of the fields of social science and to the conventions of society in general. Attention is given to all the layers of scientific writing, from nitty-gritty problems in grammar and punctuation to sensitive interpersonal issues such as criticism of other authors and advancing one's own claims. It can be used as part of a course or independently by students. Since the intended users of this textbook are novice writers, whether graduate students or new faculty members, the practical issues are spelled out. Although Writing readable research concentrates on journal articles, it also provides valuable advice on the preparation of talks and posters for conferences, abstracts and professional letters.
Rixon, Shelagh & Smith, Richard, Directory of UK ELT research 2005–2008. London: The British Council, 2010. Pp. 197. ISBN 978-086-355-632-6 (pbk).
Research-active institutions in the UK were invited to contribute to this Directory, which is available both as a searchable database and as a bibliography in printable PDF format. There are around 1,000 entries, from 59 contributing institutions. These entries include references to journal articles, chapters in edited books, papers in conference proceedings, authored books, and unpublished but electronically accessible documents and doctoral theses. Additionally, there are details of 61 externally funded research projects.
Ellis, Nick C. & Larsen-Freeman, Diane, Language as a complex adaptive system. Sussex: Wiley, 2010. Pp. vii+275. ISBN 978-1-4443-3400-5 (pbk).
In celebration of Language Learning's 60th anniversary, the journal hosted a conference at the University of Michigan from 7–9 November, 2008. The theme of the event was ‘Language as a Complex Adaptive System’. Leading researchers in linguistics, psychology and complex systems discussed the path-breaking significance of this perspective for their work, demonstrating that an understanding of language learning can only come about from such interdisciplinary, integrated inquiry. The articles in this special volume summarise this new approach and illustrate it as it applies to language usage, structure, sociolinguistics, cognitive linguistics, anthropology, language evolution, L1 and L2 acquisition, psycholinguistics and language processing, language education, individual differences and language testing.
Benson, Morton, Benson, Evelyn & Ilson, Robert F., The BBI combinatory dictionary of English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2010. Pp. xxxix+462. ISBN 978-90-272-3260-1 (hbk).
To use language you must be able to combine words with other words to form phrases and to combine words into grammatical patterns to form clauses and sentences. Traditionally, the combination of words into grammatical patterns has been called colligation, complementation or collocation, and its result has been called valency. The BBI dictionary provides information on both phraseology and valency through a series of codes, exemplification and discussion (the latter through notes on usage). This third edition of the dictionary is an expanded and updated version of the first edition (1986) and its revision (1997). In this third edition, the contents of the BBI have been increased by over 20%.
Lindstromberg, Seth, English prepositions explained (2nd edn). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2010. Pp. viii+273. ISBN 978-90-272-1174-3 (hbk).
This book has been written both for non-native and native speakers of English and is intended for teachers of English, translators, materials writers, advanced students of English and frequent users of English in general. This completely revised and expanded edition covers approximately 100 simple, compound and phrasal English prepositions of space and time – with the focus on short prepositions such as at, by, in and on. The overall aim is to explain how and why meaning changes when one preposition is swapped for another in the same context. While retaining most of the structure of the original, this edition says more about more prepositions. It also includes many more new figures. The exposition draws on recent research, and is substantially founded on evidence from digitised corpora, including frequency data. It is this explanatory, rather than merely descriptive, approach which makes it a unique resource for creative writing.
