Sylvia Chalker - The Oxford dictionary of English grammar

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The Oxford Dictionary of
English Grammar

Sylvia Chalker is the author of several grammar books, including Current English Grammar and The Little Oxford Dictionary of English Grammar. She was also a contributor to The Oxford Companion to the English Language.

Edmund Weiner is Deputy Chief Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary and co-author (with Andrew Delahunty) of the Oxford Guide to English Usage.

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SYLVIA CHALKER

EDMUND WEINER

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6 DP

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Published in the United States
by Oxford University Press Inc., New York

Sylvia Chalker and Edmund Weiner 1994

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

Database right Oxford University Press (maker)

First published 1994
First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback 1994
Reissued, with corrections, in new covers 1998

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available

ISBN-13: 978-0-19-280087-9
ISBN-10: 0-19-280087-6

Printed in Great Britain by
Clays Ltd. St Ives plc

Grammar, etymologically speaking, is related to glamour. Though few people might claim that grammar is glamorous in the modern sense, there is considerable interest in English grammar today and no shortage of grammar books, ranging from small basic books aimed at children or elementary-level foreign learners, through more advanced manuals to large scholarly works. The trouble is they may be about the same language, but they do not always speak the same language. The very range of the grammar books on offer presents problems.

There are many ways of describing grammar, and a wealth of terminology. Some of it strikes the layman as jargon (disjunct, matrix, pro-form, stative); other words appear ordinary enough but conceal specialized meanings (assimilation, comment, focus, specific). Worse, the same terms, old or new comparison, formal, pronoun, reported speech, root, stress are used by different grammarians with different meanings.

Such difficulties are not entirely avoidable. Any subject of study needs specialist words. Different grammarians are entitled to analyse language in different ways, and fresh viewpoints may call for new terms. But while grammarians sometimes explain what they mean by a new or unusual term, it is rarer for them to point out that they are using an existing term in a different way. This is a cause of real confusion. Another problem is that new terms may in the end turn out simply to be alternatives for an old concept a synonym in fact (e.g. progressive, continuous).

We have tried in this dictionary to indicate the range and variety of meanings that may lie behind a single term. The main emphasis is on the terminology of current mainstream grammar, but we have also included a considerable number of entries on the related areas of speech and meaning more grandly known as phonetics and semantics. Users will also find some terms from generative grammar, which has greatly influenced mainstream grammar in recent years but some of the more theoretical terminology of linguistics and semantics is excluded. We have also on the whole excluded outdated grammatical terminology, apart from a few traditional terms which may be familiar to the general reader.

The authors would like to thank Professor Flor Aarts, of the Katholieke Universiteit, Nijmegen, who read an early draft of the book: his comments, we believe, have led to many improvements, but the authors are alone responsible for any blemishes that remain. We would also like to thank our families for their support, encouragement, and, at times, forbearance.

SC

ESCW

London, Oxford 1993

1 Entries are strictly alphabetical. Thus:

agent

agentive

agentless passive

agent noun

2 Where two or more terms are