The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language

The definitive new grammatical description of international Standard English for contemporary specialists in the language.

Rodney Huddleston (Author), Geoffrey K. Pullum (Author), Laurie Bauer (With), Betty Birner (With), Ted Briscoe (With), Peter Collins (With), David Denison (With), David Lee (With), Anita Mittwoch (With), Geoffrey Nunberg (With), Frank Palmer (With), John Payne (With), Peter Peterson (With), Lesley Stirling (With), Gregory Ward (With)

9780521431460, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 15 April 2002

1860 pages
25.7 x 18.3 x 7.2 cm, 3.1 kg

'… very stimulating … It will, deservedly, replace its predecessor A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language [] and I anticipate that it will give grammarians [] much to argue about for many years to come … continues a respected scholarly tradition.' Language and Literature

This book presents a new and comprehensive descriptive grammar of English, written by the principal authors in collaboration with an international research team of a dozen linguists in five countries. It represents a major advance over previous grammars by virtue of drawing systematically on the linguistic research carried out on English during the last forty years. It incorporates insights from the theoretical literature but presents them in a way that is accessible to readers without formal training in linguistics. It is based on a sounder and more consistent descriptive framework than previous large-scale grammars, and includes much more explanation of grammatical terms and concepts, together with justification for the ways in which the analysis differs from traditional grammar. The book contains twenty chapters and a guide to further reading. Its usefulness is enhanced by diagrams of sentence structure, cross-references between sections, a comprehensive index, and user-friendly design and typography throughout.

1. Preliminaries Geoffrey K. Pullum and Rodney Huddleston
2. Syntactic overview Rodney Huddleston
3. The verb Rodney Huddleston
4. The clause, I: mainly complements Rodney Huddleston
5. Nouns and noun phrases John Payne and Rodney Huddleston
6. Adjectives and adverbs Geoffrey K. Pullum and Rodney Huddleston
7. Prepositions and preposition phrases Geoffrey K. Pullum and Rodney Huddleston
8. The clause, II: mainly adjuncts Anita Mittwoch, Rodney Huddleston and Peter Collins
9. Negation Geoffrey K. Pullum and Rodney Huddleston
10. Clause type and illocutionary force Rodney Huddleston
11. Content clauses and reported speech Rodney Huddleston
12. Relative clauses and unbounded dependencies Rodney Huddleston, Geoffrey K. Pullum and Peter G. Peterson
13. Comparative constructions Rodney Huddleston
14. Non-finite and verbless clauses Rodney Huddleston
15. Coordination and supplementation Rodney Huddleston, John Payne and Peter G. Peterson
16. Information packaging Gregory Ward, Betty Birner and Rodney Huddleston
17. Deixis and anaphora Lesley Stirling and Rodney Huddleston
18. Inflectional morphology and related matters F. R. Palmer, Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum
19. Lexical word-formation Laurie Bauer and Rodney Huddleston
20. Punctuation Geoffrey Nunberg, Ted Briscoe and Rodney Huddleston
Further reading
Index.

Subject Areas: ELT background & reference material [EB], Language teaching & learning [other than ELT CJ], Language: reference & general [CB]