Over a period of over forty years, Geoffrey Leech has made notable contributions to the field of literary stylistics, using the interplay between linguistic form and literary function as a key to the mystery' of how a text comes to be invested with artistic potential. In this book, seven earlier papers and articles, read previously only by a restricted audience, have been brought together with four new chapters, the whole volume showing a continuity of approach across a period when all too often literary and linguistic studies have appeared to drift further apart. Leech sets the concept of foregrounding' (also known as defamiliarization) at the heart of the interplay between form and interpretation. Through practical and insightful examination of how poems, plays and prose works produce special meaning, he counteracts the flight from the text' that has characterized thinking about language and literature in the last thirty years, when the response of the reader, rather than the characteristics and meaning potential of the text itself, have been given undue prominence. The book provides an enlightening analysis of well-known (as well as less well-known) texts of great writers of the past, including Keats, Shelley, Samuel Johnson, Shaw, Dylan Thomas, and Virginia Woolf....

A Communicative Grammar of English was first published in 1975, since then the book has established itself as a grammar innovative in approach, reliable in coverage, and clear in its explanations. It is now available in this fully revised and redesigned third edition to provide up-to-date and accessible help to teachers, advanced learners and undergraduates students of English. A completely new Workbook co-authored by ELT specialists Edward Woods and Rudy Coppieters will also accompany this edition. This edition is divided into three parts: Part One: A guide to the use of this book, this looks at the way English grammar varies in different types of English, for example 'formal' and 'informal', 'spoken' and 'written' Part Two: Grammar in use, the most important part, presents grammar through the eyes of the communicator and focuses on the uses of grammar rather than on grammatical structure Part Three: A-Z in English grammar provides an alphabetically arranged guide to English grammar...

This alphabetical guide clearly defines standard grammatical terms and shows how they are used, encompassing variants as found in Huddleston and Pullum's Cambridge Grammar of the English Language.

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