English Language Today

Truth be told, this is quite an advanced book on language written from deep within the research vaults of the English linguistic history, but it's written in a language that most people will be able to understand. Behind the apparently frivolous and amusing selection of examples, Jeremy Butterfield is offering a serious update on how lexicography is conducted in the digital age. Dictionaries are no longer constructed from contributions handed in on slips of paper by enthusiastic amateurs: they are compiled by software programs crunching vast stockpiles of words stored in databases - known as the 'corpus'. This is a collection of examples of how the English language is actually being used, drawn from the printed word - from literary novels and specialist journals to everyday newspapers and magazines, and from Hansard to the language of chatrooms, emails, and weblogs... Read more >>