R. M. W. Dixon's landmark 1972 grammar of the Dyirbal language of North Queensland is one of the best-known and most widely-cited language descriptions in the history of linguistics. In the fifty years since its publication, Dixon has continued his detailed work on the language, extending and refining the descriptions in light of more recent theoretical advances. The resulting A New Grammar of Dyirbal offers a comprehensive contemporary grammar of the language, reanalysed in myriad ways and drawing on an extensive corpus of texts. Among its many new features are further discussion of the applicative/causative derivation; a fresh focus on the role of the pervasive 'pivot', the syntactic linking of S and O functions; a detailed account of the two antipassives and their semantic contrast and phonological conditioning; and an extended account of relative clauses. The volume is accompanied by a companion website hosting the full set of textual data on which the grammar is based, as well as a thesaurus/dictionary of nouns, adjectives, and verbs across ten dialects of Dyirbal.

Originally published in 1972, this study is dedicated to the surviving speakers of the Dyirbal, Giramay and Mamu dialects. For more than ten thousand years they lived in harmony with each other and with their environment. Over one hundred years ago many of them were shot and poisoned by European invaders. Those allowed to survive have been barely tolerated tenants on their own lands, and have had their beliefs, habits and language help up to ridicule and scorn. In the last decade they have seen their remaining forests taken and cleared by an American company, with the destruction of sites whose remembered antiquity is many thousands of years older than the furthest event in the shallow history of their desecrators. The survivors of the three tribes have stood up to these diversities with dignity and humour. They continue to look forward to the day when they may again be allowed to live in peaceful possession of some of their own lands, and may be accorded a respect that they have been denied, but which they have been forcibly made to accord to others.

Professor Dixon examines the grammar of Yidin, an Australian dying language, through phonology, syntax and of a 'mixed ergative' type that cannot easily be accommodated in terms of standard syntactic theory.

This book sets out to answer a question that many linguists have been hesitant to ask: are some languages better than others? Written in the author's usual accessible and engaging style, the book outlines the essential and optional features of language, before concluding that the ideal language does not and probably never will exist.

This book shows how grammar helps people communicate and looks at the ways grammar and meaning interrelate. The author starts from the notion that a speaker codes a meaning into grammatical forms which the listener is then able to recover: each word, he shows, has its own meaning and each bit of grammar its own function, their combinations creating and limiting the possibilities for different words. He uncovers a rationale for the varying grammatical properties of different words and in the process explains many facts about English - such as why we can say I wish to go, I wish that he would go, and I want to go but not I want that he would go. The first part of the book reviews the main points of English syntax and discusses English verbs in terms of their semantic types including those of Motion, Giving, Speaking, Liking, and Trying. In the second part Professor Dixon looks at eight grammatical topics, including complement clauses, transitivity and causatives, passives, and the promotion of a non-subject to subject, as in Dictionaries sell well. This is the updated and revised edition of A New Approach to English Grammar on Semantic Principles. It includes new chapters on tense and aspect, nominalizations and possession, and adverbs and negation, and contains a new discussion of comparative forms of adjectives. It also explains recent changes in English grammar, including how they has replaced the tabooed he as a pronoun referring to either gender, as in When a student reads this book, they will learn a lot about English grammar in a most enjoyable manner.

This book explores the expression of information source, inferences, assumptions, probability and possibility, and gradations of doubt and beliefs across a wide range of languages in different cultural settings. Like others in the series it will interest both linguists and linguistically-minded anthropologists.

The series builds an extensive collection of high quality descriptions of languages around the world. Each volume offers a comprehensive grammatical description of a single language together with fully analyzed sample texts and, if appropriate, a word list and other relevant information which is available on the language in question. There are no restrictions as to language family or area, and although special attention is paid to hitherto undescribed languages, new and valuable treatments of better known languages are also included. No theoretical model is imposed on the authors; the only criterion is a high standard of scientific quality. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Birgit Sievert.