New Releases by Donna Jo Napoli

The gods grant immortality to the mermaid Sirena when she rescues a human man from the sea and they fall in love, but his mortality creates great conflict between love and honor when he is called to defend Greece in the Trojan War.

The Little Angel of Independence helps a girl named Elena develop independence and self-reliance when she loses her beloved toy giraffe during a visit to the park.

When Roberto sneaks off to see a movie in his Italian village, he has no idea that life as he knows it is over. German soldiers raid the theater, round up the boys in the audience, and pack them onto a train. After a terrifying journey, Roberto and his best friend Samuele find themselves in a brutal work camp, where food is scarce and horror is everywhere. The boys vow to stay together no matter what. But Samuele has a dangerous secret, which, if discovered, could get them both killed. Lovers of historical fiction will be captivated by this tragic, triumphant, and deeply moving novel.

High in the mountains, Zel lives with her mother, who insists they have all they need -- for they have each other. Zel''s life is peaceful and protected -- until a chance encounter changes everything. When she meets a beautiful young prince at the market one day, she is profoundly moved by new emotions. But Zel''s mother sees the future unfolding -- and she will do the unspeakable to prevent Zel from leaving her..."Will leave readers spellbound."-- Publishers Weekly, starred review

This introduction to linguistic methodology and theory acquaints students with the analytical study of language and the ways in which linguists think and approach their material. Reader-friendly and highly accessible, the book assumes no previous background in linguistics. Linguistics is unique among texts today in that it brings the reader face-to-face with current cutting-edge theories. It covers in depth the five core areas of theoretical linguistics - phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics - and adds brief discussions of conversation interaction and historical/comparative linguistics where appropriate. Throughout the book, readers are asked to consider various hypotheses and to use them to account for a range of data. Accordingly, problem sets are included at the end of each chapter. While the data in these problems are drawn from multiple languages, all chapters contain problem sets on at least English, a Romance language, Japanese, and American Sign Language.

When her pet rabbit's newborn babies die, her doctor tells her that she may have scoliosis, and her aunt is diagnosed with cancer, ten-year-old Laurel feels constantly reminded of the mortality of all living things.

Jimmy, the froglet son of an enchanted frog-prince, tries to save his pond from the evil hag and in the process finds himself transformed into a human boy.

In this study Donna Jo Napoli takes a common-sense approach to the notions of argument and predicate. Discussions of predication within Government and Binding theory have stressed the configurational properties of the phrases involved, and Napoli argues that this has led to proposals for more and more elaborate syntactic structures that nevertheless fail to provide genuinely explanatory accounts. She presents a convincing case for viewing the notion of predicate as a semantic primitive which cannot be defined by looking simply at the lexicon or simply at the syntactic structure, and offers a theory or predication where the key to the subject-predicate relationship is theta-role assignment. The book then goes on to offer principles for the coindexing of a predicate with its subject role player. These coindexing principles make use of Chomsky's 1986 notion of barriers, but instead of being sensitive to configurational notions like c-command and governing category, Napoli argues that they are sensitive to thematic structure. In the final chapter of the book Napoli extends the principles for predication coindexing to anaphor binding, by introducing the notion of argument ladders.