Pieter de Haan

Reviews: An Empirical Grammar of the English Verb System

In his preface, the author explains that this volume is a complement to an earlier volume, titledAn Empirical Grammar of the English Verb: Modal Verbs, published in 1995 by the samepublisher. The present volume clearly aims to provide an inventory of the various verb combinations within the English verb phrase. This is done on the basis of the study of a large amount of corpus data. I am not so sure whether the term grammar in the title is entirely justified, for even though information about distribution and frequency of occurrence of the various patterns is provided, the book hardly ever goes beyond providing this kind of information. The authorwrites in his introduction that “all instances of verbs and verb phrases can be explained as cases of rule-governed grammatical behaviour,” but what these rules are is not explained anywhere. I will come back to this below. The book definitely has a number of strong points, but it also has quite a number of serious shortcomings. Let me first discuss the general contents of the book. It is divided into seven chapters: “Introduction,” “General Categories,” “Verb Forms,” “Verb Phrases,” “Finite Verb Phrases,” “Non-finite Verb Phrases,” and “Time Orientation.” Of these, Chapter 4 (“Verb Phrases”), with more than 300 pages, is clearly the most important one. The book concludes with a list of corpora used (1 page) and a 61-page index. In the introduction, the author explains the inductive approach he has followed. Basically, there are three steps: from language to verb patterns and their contexts, from database creation (i.e., storing the verb patterns identified) to linguistic analysis of verb patterns, and from the results of these analyses to a grammar of the English verb. He also states (6) that the grammar is based on authentic English and that there has been no borrowing from previous grammars. This is probably also why there is no reference section. He goes on to explain the structure of the various sections in the chapters that follow. In each of these, there are “essentials,” “prototypes,” and “details.” The essen-