Confessions of a verbivore--A celebration of English. Our abounding English language; Doing a number on English ; A guide to Britspeak, A to Zed --This American language. A declaration of language independence ; Talking turkey ; All-American dialects ; Slang as it is slung ; A circus of words ; Words from oure presidents ; Stamp out fadspeak! ; Like, what's happening to our language? -- The glamour of grammar. Conan the grammarian ; Laying down the law--without lying down on the job; Sex and the singular pronoun ; An open letter to Ann Landers--Spellbound. Under a spell ; I before E, except?..;Fairly familiar phrases--Getting the word out. Writing is ... ; How I write; Plane talk; Radio days; English with a Russian dressing--The collide-o-scope of language. How wise is proverbial wisdom? ; Words that never stray ; Heads without tails ; Our uppity English language ; On palindromes ; The long and the short of English--The romance of words. Toothsome etymologies ; Haunted words ; My kids the poker players ; On paradox ; A primer of political words; The true meaning of Christmas ; Literature lives!--It's a punderful life. Jest for the pun of it ; Pun your way to success ; Nothing works for me ; A bilingual pun is twice the fun ; My favorite monsters.

The architecture of the human language faculty has been one of the main foci of the linguistic research of the last half century. This branch of linguistics, broadly known as Generative Grammar, is concerned with the formulation of explanatory formal accounts of linguistic phenomena with the ulterior goal of gaining insight into the properties of the 'language organ'. The series comprises high quality monographs and collected volumes that address such issues. The topics in this series range from phonology to semantics, from syntax to information structure, from mathematical linguistics to studies of the lexicon.