Grammar of English: A Comprehensive Guide

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A major reference grammar offering comprehensive coverage of spoken and written English based on real everyday usage. The Cambridge Grammar of English is a major reference grammar from the world’s leading grammar publisher.

Using groundbreaking language research, it offers clear explanations of spoken and written English based on real everyday usage. A clear two-part structure makes the book particularly user-friendly.

In the first section, A-Z entries give more attention to lexico-grammar and other language areas that tend to be neglected in grammar references. The second section covers traditional grammatical categories such as tense, clause structure and parts of speech.




The grammar of English:

English grammar is the way in which meanings are encoded into wordings in the English language. This includes the structure of words, phrases, clauses, and sentences, right up to the structure of whole texts.

There are historical, social, cultural and regional variations of English. Divergences from the grammar described here occur in some dialects. This article describes a generalized present-day Standard English – a form of speech and writing used in public discourse, including broadcasting, education, entertainment, government, and news, over a range of registers from formal to informal. There are differences in grammar between the standard forms of British, American, and Australian English, although these are more minor than differences in vocabulary and pronunciation.

Modern English has largely abandoned the inflectional case system of Indo-European in favor of analytic constructions. The personal pronouns retain morphological case more strongly than any other word class (a remnant of the more extensive Germanic case system of Old English). For other pronouns, and all nouns, adjectives, and articles, grammatical function is indicated only by word order, by prepositions, and by the “Saxon genitive or English possessive” (-‘s).

Eight “word classes” or “parts of speech” are commonly distinguished in English: nouns, determiners, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, and conjunctions. Nouns form the largest word class, and verbs the second-largest. Unlike many Indo-European languages, English nouns do not have grammatical gender.