Reviews for Prepositional Infinitives in Romance : A Usage-Based Approach to Syntactic Change

The average rating for Prepositional Infinitives in Romance : A Usage-Based Approach to Syntactic Change based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-08-23 00:00:00 Ken Vo This book has one problem with it-- the writing style, which is called breezy or chatty by the people who like it, condescending or patronizing by the people who didn't. I became impatient at being spoken to like a child, but apparently the author is addressing himself to young people. That breeziness, while potentially irritating, is also the book's greatest strength. Crystal's boundless enthusiasm for his subject makes the study of language, which is, in practice, one of the driest and most technical of fields, seem exciting, fun, and of utmost importance. Nice short chapters, cute woodcut illustrations, and sidebars full of amusing examples make the read easy. Crystal begins at the beginning, with how a baby learns to make sounds. Topics increase in sophistication until he is asking the "ultimate questions" of what is the relationship between language and the wiring of the human brain. Along the way he touches on every subject pertaining to linguistics-- grammar, accents and dialects, sign language, slang, styles, the various uses of language, and more. Two of Crystal's personal enthusiasms are for the changes brought by electronic media, which he celebrates, and does not view as a decline, and the loss of world languages, which he views as a tragedy, and calls upon the reader to help reverse. Crystal is convincing enough to make a young person decide to pursue further study in linguistics, which is exactly what he is hoping for.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-09-02 00:00:00 Thibaut Nouveau I think the low ratings are unfair as I believe many of the reviewers do not realize this book is for young people. As a speech/language pathologist, the content was a review for me...but I also really enjoy David Crystal's books, so I picked it up to see what he would say. I found the style to be easy-breezy enough, but packed full of the "need to know" conceptual information vital to briefly understanding how language develops given real-life examples. I was seized with the wish that all teacher preparation programs would make this required reading. In this book are concepts that are so integral to learning, but those I truly believe many teachers don't realize are foundational for a student's understanding of their instruction. It is a conversational enough book to be non-threatening to one's time and effort (I finished it in an afternoon) and would increase the understanding and empathy among educators of the many variables (and potential road-blocks) to children's communication which is so relied upon for participating in today's learning environments.