Bas Aarts - Oxford Modern English Grammar

Oxford Modern English Grammar

Bas Aarts is Professor of English Linguistics and Director of the Survey of English Usage at University College London. His previous books include Small Clauses in English: The Nonverbal Types (Mouton de Gruyter, 1992); The Verb in Contemporary English , co-edited with Charles F. Meyer (Cambridge University Press, 1995); English Syntax and Argumentation (Palgrave, 1997, 2001, 2008); Investigating Natural Language: Working with the British Component of the International Corpus of English , co-authored with Gerald Nelson and Sean Wallis (John Benjamins, 2002); Fuzzy Grammar: A Reader , co-edited with David Denison, Evelien Keizer, and Gergana Popova (Oxford University Press, 2004); The Handbook of English Linguistics , co-edited with April McMahon (Blackwell, 2006); and Syntactic Gradience: The Nature of Grammatical Indeterminacy (Oxford University Press, 2007). He is one of the founding editors of the journal English Language and Linguistics .

Bas Aarts

Department of English Language and Literature University College London

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX 2 6DP
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Clays Ltd., St Ives plcISBN 97801995331901 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

In memory of my mother Sj Aarts-Postmes (19342008)

The aim of this grammar is to offer a modern, concise, but nevertheless wide-ranging description of the structure of contemporary standard British and American English. The book is intended for anyone who is interested in English grammar, and has been written without an assumption on my part that the reader has any previous knowledge of grammatical concepts.The account of grammar presented in this book is descriptive, not prescriptive: it describes the language as it is used today. Readers hoping to find confirmation that the so-called split infinitive is an odious manifestation of the decline of the English languageto give but one example of a common usage shibbolethwill be disappointed. The view taken here is that the English language is not a static entity, but is continually subject to inevitable change, which is reflected in its lexis and grammar.It is not possible to write a book like this without acknowledging previous work on English grammar. The framework adopted here relies heavily on the two most complete and in-depth accounts of English grammar currently available, namely Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, and Jan Svartviks Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (1985) and Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey Pullum et al.s Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (2002). These grammars offer sophisticated and detailed descriptions of English that go far beyond the scope of the present book. It should be noted, however, that I have not in all cases followed the grammatical analyses presented in these books. The major points of divergence are discussed in the Notes and further reading section.I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Flor Aarts, Peter Collins, Rodney Huddleston, and Geoffrey Leech (in alphabetical order) for reading the entire manuscript and commenting on it in great detail. I am very fortunate to have received this tremendously valuable feedback from such eminent grammarians, and their input has made this a much better book than it would otherwise have been. Im also grateful to my editors at Oxford University Press, Ben Harris, Vicky Donald, Rebecca Lane and Clare Jenkins. For their help during the editing stage I would like to thank Jill Bowie for her superb copy-editing, Helen Liebeck for proofreading, and Phil Aslett for compiling the subject index.BAS AARTSUniversity College London
April 2010 Notational conventions

*	An asterisk indicates an impossible structure, i.e. a structure that does not conform to the grammatical rules of English. Example: *They likes to read . In this example the third person plural Subject they is followed by a verb with a third person singular inflectional ending.
This symbol is used to indicate an implicit Subject. Example: I want [ to read it].
rel.	This is used to indicate an implicit relativized element. Example: The power [that relenables this union] Coleridge categorized as the imagination .
sub	This is used to indicate a missing subordinating conjunction that . Example: They think [subthey are funny ].
This symbol is used where the form label can be of different kinds (that is, where the function can be realized by different kinds of forms).
arrows	These indicate movement, e.g. passivization, extraposition, or raising. Example: to enjoy cricket . The underscore symbol is explained below.
brackets []	Brackets are used: (1) to indicate words that together form a constituent phrase, clause, etc. A labelled bracketing includes a subscript indicator of the syntactic status of the constituent. Example: [NP Cats ] [VPeat [NP fish ]]; (2) to indicate that a lexical item, usually a verb, is followed by a Complement which contains a particular word. Example: HAVE [