Reviews for Semantic Interfaces: Reference, Anaphora and Aspect

The average rating for Semantic Interfaces: Reference, Anaphora and Aspect based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-11-11 00:00:00 Damien Williams Let's start by saying that I'd never imagined I'd enjoy this book. Mostly because it was given to me by my morphology professor, and I don't get along very well with morphology (no, not the teacher). I can sum up its perks essentially in 2 points: 1. The style. Maybe you can already guess it by the creative title, but this book is not exactly a textbook with linguistic jargon, weird and unreadable symbols or things of this sort. It's actually pretty straight-forward and clear. I'd say that almost everybody could read it without any particular problem (except boredom for the ones not interested in the topic). 2. The topic. Not 100% of the content was totally engaging, but I have to admit that the author comes up with several curiosities I had never thought about before but that should definitely tackled more in class. The part about political correctness was particularly illuminating, and I'll likely dive deeper into the matter. Anyway, even when the subject of the chapter wasn't exactly the most entertaining past-time ever, the light tone and the frequent jokes of the writer made it much more bearable. Is there anything that prevented me from rating it 5 stars? Yes, two main reasons: 1. Probably the sillier between the two, I found terribly annoying to read things like "sho" instead of ʃʊ. I'm aware that the book is meant for a wider public and therefore the author avoided the IPA, but for me it was terribly confusing. 2. The author would probably laugh at me for this (considering all the paragraphs about taboos), but I seriously think that she exaggerated a bit with all those references about sex. I'm perfectly aware that it shouldn't be considered a taboo anymore, but I have the terrible feeling that she exploited the topic just to make her book "more involving".

Review # 2 was written on 2012-05-06 00:00:00 Gerald Randall Another look at the English language from numerous vantage-points: slang, euphemisms, word origins, use in advertising, and grammatical considerations. One thing I struggled with in the early parts of the book is that it appears to be written for an Australian audience, addressing things that an Australian would be familiar with, but not necessarily an American. Nonetheless, at some level, English is English, and Burridge covers many aspects of our use (/misuse) of the language in many interesting ways.