English Words and Phrases. An Integrated Approach

Readers of English Words and Phrases: An Integrated Approach will find that in various ways this book departs from earlier treatments of linguistic issues such as morphology, word formation, word meaning or phraseology in the description of the English language. A crucial departure is justified by its integrative approach, where the boundaries between parts of words (morpheme), words or phrases, or even grammar itself, as has been found in recent research, is unclear. If English were to be divided into memorised knowledge, roughly what an ordinary dictionary would provide us with, and the rules to combine these items as provided by a grammar, this is not done as it was thought of in the past. It is now becoming more evident that native speakers of English do not only memorise words as it was proposed in earlier linguistic theories, but also parts of words and thousands of meaningful phrases which are used both in order to understand or to produce language. This has led us to propose a critical approach to the description of English vocabulary and phrases which is more comprehensive and less dogmatic, also by considering the meaning aspect and lexical and meaning change.