Product Overview
A new and substantially reworked, reorganized, and expanded version of Charles Townsend's classic textbook for graduate students. New sections have been added, and many of the previous sections expanded to provide more thorough coverage. While the book retains its copious, direct, and useful comparisons to Russian, it has been made more independent of Russian, with many new English translations added. It should be emphasized that, even more than in the first edition, the main value of the book is its thorough treatment of Czech grammatical areas, which will be equally accessible to users with or without a knowledge of Russian. Though CTR covers a great many topics of Czech grammar quite fully, it cannot replace ordinary Czech textbooks. It can be used as a supplement to regular grammars, and in many cases the analyses offer a truer, more sophisticated and "linguistic" view of individual topics. CTR serves particularly well as an introduction to Czech linguistics for those interested in Slavic linguistics learning Czech as a second Slavic language after Russian, however the lack of dependence on Russian also makes this book of equal benefit to linguistics students with little or no Russian. Knowledge of Slavic linguistics or even linguistics itself is not a prequisite for using CTR. All structural material is fully explained, particularly in chapter 2, where the bulk of the structural (and historically motivated) material is discussed. Extensive and comprehensive exercises accompany each chapter, and because keys to the exercises are also provided, the book is highly suitable for individual study of Czech.
