Sidney Greenbaum

A Grammar of contemporary English

The publication of this important volume fills the need for an up-to-date survey of the entire scope of English syntax. Though it falls short of a perfectly balanced treatment of the whole system, it touches upon all the essential topics and treats in depth a number of crucial problems of current interest such as case, ellipsis, and information focus. Even the publishers’ claims are vindicated to a surprising degree. The statement that it “constitutes a standard reference grammar” is reasonably well justified. Recent investigations, including the authors’ own research, are integrated into the “accumulated grammatical tradition” quite effectively. But whether it is “the fullest and most comprehensive synchronic description of English grammar ever written” is arguable. No one acquainted with Poutsma’s work would agree with that. Very advanced foreign students o r native speakers of English who want to learn about basic grammar will find some of thel sections suitable for their needs, such as the lesson about restrictive and nonrestrictive relative clauses, though even here some of the explanations require very intensive study. Most of the chapters are rather like an advanced textbook for teachers or linguists. The organization and viewpoint give the impression of a carefully planned university lecture supplemented by diagrams, charts, and lists. A good example is the lesson on auxiliaries and verb phrases, which starts with a set of sample sentences demonstrating that “should see” and “happen to see” behave differently under various transformations and expansions. After the essential concepts are explained and exemplified-lexical verb, semi-auxiliary, operator, and the like-lists and paradigms are given as in the usual reference work. A particularly useful feature of this chapter is the outline of modal auxiliaries with examples of their divergent meanings.

A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language

An indispensable store of information on the English language, written by some of the best-known grammarians in the world.

Language Variation and Acceptability.

Linguists have disagreed over what sequences to include in a description of the English language. The disagreements often reflect differences in their goals and theory; the result has been that what is acceptable does not necessarily coincide with what is grammatical within a particular grammatical theory. In addition, native speakers of a languageincluding linguists-frequently disagree as to whether particular sequences are acceptable; differences in evaluation may reflect variation in language use. Linguists have used several methods to elicit acceptability reactions from groups of informants and to investigate language use. We need both types of information, because attitude and use do not always coincide, particularly where normative statements have been made. The foreign language teacher should be aware of language variation, so that he can decide what forms to teach and when to introduce variants.

On the writing of grammars

Grammar books are written for many purposes and with different users in mind. What are the particular problems of the scholarly reference grammar towards the end of the 20th century?

Spelling Variants in British English

Raven McDavid devoted his academic career to the study of variation in the English language. It is therefore appropriate to dedicate to him this investigation into spelling variants in British English.1 A recent work on language prescription and standardization asserts confidently, &dquo;Twentieth-century English spelling is almost absolutely invariant&dquo; (Milroy and Milroy 1985:66). The reservation expressed by &dquo;almost&dquo; may refer to the well-known differences between British and American English. But to what extent is there variation in spelling within British English itself? To answer this question, I embarked on a pilot probe. I collected and analysed all the spelling variants for the letter A in a British desk dictionary (equivalent in size to an American collegiate dictionary): Collins Dictionary of the f’n9lisk Laxfua_oe in its 1983 second updated reprint (henceforth Collin-Y). I checked my findings with the Lon_fman Dictionary of the Enjrti5h Lan_fu4.1e, a somewhat larger British dictionary, in its first impression of 1984 (henceforth Lon_emen). So as not to overstate the extent of spelling variation, I took some rigorous decisions on what to count as variation: