Word grammar is a theory of language structure and is based on the assumption that language, and indeed the whole of knowledge, is a network, and that virtually all of knowledge is learned. It combines the psychological insights of cognitive linguistics with the rigour of more formal theories. This textbook spans a broad range of topics from prototypes, activation and default inheritance to the details of syntactic, morphological and semantic structure. It introduces elementary ideas from cognitive science and uses them to explain the structure of language including a survey of English grammar.

In the first half of the twentieth century, English grammar disappeared from the curriculum of most schools in England, but since the 1960s it has gradually been reconceptualised, under the influence of linguistics, and now once again has a central place in the official curriculum. Our aim is not only to document these changes, but also to explain them. We suggest that the decline of grammar in schools was linked to a similar gap in English universities, where there was virtually no serious research or teaching on English grammar. Conversely, the upsurge of academic research since the 1960s has provided a healthy foundation for school-level work and has prevented a simple return to old-fashioned grammar-teaching now that grammar is once again fashionable. We argue that linguists should be more aware of the links between their research and the school curriculum.

One of the fundamental questions on which we linguists disagree is whether or not our subject is useful for education. On one side is a long tradition, stretching back to the classical world, in which the practical benefits were clear and agreed – for example, the early Stoic grammarians aimed to improve literary style (Robins 1967: 16), and the Latin grammarians wrote pedagogical texts for use in school (ibid.: 54). In modern times this tradition is represented by leading linguists such as Tesnière (1959) and Halliday (1964), whose work has been motivated at least in part by the desire to improve language teaching at school. On the other hand is an equally long philosophical tradition of ‘pure’ scholarship for its own sake, in which the only motivation was a desire to understand language better. Recently this tradition is most clearly represented by two linguists who otherwise have little in common, Sampson (1980) and Chomsky (Olson, Faigley & Chomsky 1991), both of whom have denied that linguistics has, can have or indeed should have any relevance to language teaching.The aim of this paper is to defend the traditional idea that linguistics has an important contribution to make in language teaching, though I shall not of course suggest that every piece of academic research should have a clear pay-off in terms of practical benefits. ‘Blue-skies’ research is just as important in linguistics as in other disciplines. All I shall argue is that our discipline, seen as a whole, has an important interface with education, and that research whose results cross this interface is just as important as that which feeds into, say, neuroscience or child development. Indeed, I shall go further by arguing that academic linguistics is weakened if we ignore the impact of education on language, so information must cross this interface in both directions. If the interface is important even for ‘pure’ research, it follows that we cannot simply name it ‘applied linguistics’ and leave it to those who call themselves applied linguists. My point is that the debate is relevant to all linguists, however ‘pure’, because if education has a profound impact on language, we should know rather better than we do at present exactly what that impact is.

Abstract:“Ethical investing” is interpreted in the following paper to be the use of non-financial normative criteria by investors in the choice of securities for their portfolios.Ethical investors may aim at fulfilling duties they feel they have, possibly including increasing the amount of good in society through the consequences of their buying and selling behavior. The main duties are those of not-profiting from bad corporate behavior and of punishing bad (or rewarding good) firms. The main consequence desired is that managers manage corporations in a more ethical manner. But ethical investors (as opposed to some other kinds of investors who are also interested in normative issues) also aim at receiving returns based on the market risk of their investments.If the aim of managers is to maximize shareholder wealth, then ethical investors can fulfill their duties or achieve their desired consequences only if their trading activities affect shareholder wealth, i.e., share price. A theoretical argument is presented to show that this trading activity will not affect share price or return. In addition, reference is made to results of empirical studies which show that ethical stocks yield market returns, i.e., that the share price of ethical firms is unaffected by the actions of ethical investors.If the trading activity of ethical investors fails to affect share price and return, then these investors fail to fulfill any of their goals or to achieve their ends.

No abstract