Book People Archive

Book Review: Far From the Madding Gerund

[NOTE SENTENCE IN LAST PAR.: "Every article in the book is 
still available on the Language Log."]


From: WORLD WIDE WORDS Newsletter, ISSUE 490           
Saturday 3 June 2006
Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK
http://www.worldwidewords.org
A formatted version of this newsletter is available online at 
http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/fjuo.htm


2. Book Review: Far From the Madding Gerund
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This book is a collection of articles written by two professional 
linguists, Mark Liberman and Geoffrey K Pullum, all of which were 
first posted on their Web site, the Language Log. The theme of the 
site is grammar and correctness in English.
 .
 .
 .
This is a book to dip into, not to be read straight through. Nobody
will find every item interesting--a discussion of how to pronounce the
name of the Iraqi city Samarra, which introduces subtleties of Arabic
pronunciation, may be passed over without loss, though you might like
to know it means "happy is he who sees it"; the article on analysis of
discourse structures will glaze the eyes of anybody not in the field.
If you're flummoxed by such grammatical terms as hierarchical ontology, 
predicate, nominalisation, count noun, or prepositional phrase,
you perhaps ought to give the book a miss. If you're not sure, the
miracle of the Web means you can test-read articles by popping over to
the Language Log site (http://www.languagelog.com/).

The book is an example of what looks like a trend: the conversion 
of blogs into books, or "blooks". Every article in the book is 
still available on the Language Log. So why pay money for what you 
can read for free? That's a good question that only the publisher's 
sales figures may ultimately answer, but it suggests that the old-
fashioned ink-on-dead-trees, no-batteries-required, go-anywhere 
book still has some life in it.
 .
 .
 .