Resistant Structures

Taking Wittgenstein's "Don't think, but look" as his motto, Richard Strier argues against the application of a priori schemes to Renaissance (and all) texts. He argues for the possibility and desirabi

Grammatical Complexity in Academic English uses corpus-based analyses to challenge a number of dominant stereotypes and assumptions within linguistics. Biber and Gray tackle the nature of grammatical complexity, demonstrating that embedded phrasal structures are as important as embedded dependent clauses. The authors also overturn ingrained assumptions about linguistic change, showing that grammatical change occurs in writing as well as speech. This work establishes that academic writing is structurally compressed (rather than elaborated); that it is often not explicit in the expression of meaning; and that scientific academic writing has been the locus of some of the most important grammatical changes in English over the past 200 years (rather than being conservative and resistant to change). Supported throughout with textual evidence, this work is essential reading for discourse analysts, sociolinguists, and applied linguists, as well as descriptive linguists and historical linguists

This book is about the adhesion of bacteria to their human hosts. Although adhesion is essential for maintaining members of the normal microflora in/on their host, it is also the crucial first stage in any infectious disease. It is important, therefore, to fully understand the mechanisms underlying bacterial adhesion so that we may be able to develop methods of maintaining our normal (protective) microflora, and of preventing pathogenic bacteria from initiating an infectious process. These topics are increasingly important because of the growing prevalence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria and, consequently, the need to develop alternative approaches for the prevention and treatment of infectious diseases. This book describes the bacterial structures responsible for adhesion and the molecular mechanisms underlying the adhesion process. It also deals with the consequences of adhesion for both the adherent bacterium and the host cell/tissue to which it has adhered.