The Oxford English Grammar

This book is addressed primarily to native speakers of English and others who use English as their first language. It is a comprehensive account of present-day English that is chiefly focused on the standard varieties of American and British English, but it also refers frequently to non-standard varieties and it draws on the history of the language to illuminate and explain features of English of today. It offers a description of the language and is not intended to prescribe or proscribe.
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The Oxford English Grammar The Oxford nglish Grammar SIDNEY GREENBAUM In memoriam OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Great Clarendon Street, Oxford 0x2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Oar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Sao Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Sidney Greenbaum 1996 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published by Oxford University Press 1996 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 You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available ISBN 0-19-861250-8 10 9 8 7 Printed in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd.. Padstow, Cornwall FOR AVRAHAM AND MASHA Preface This book is addressed primarily to native speakers of English and others who use English as their first language. It is a comprehensive account of present-day English that is chiefly focused on the standard varieties of American and British English, but it also refers frequently to non-standard varieties and it draws on the history of the language to illuminate and explain features of English of today. It offers a description of the language and is not intended to prescribe or proscribe. This work is unique in its coverage for native speakers of the language. It is written to be accessible to non-specialists, but students of the English language and related subjects will also find it of interest and value. It serves as a reference work and can also be used as a textbook. Each chapter is prefaced by a list of contents and a summary of the chapter. You may wish to read through a whole chapter or to consult particular sections. The Glossary at the end of the book will provide you with succinct explanations of terms that are frequently used in the book. In writing this book, I have drawn on my many years of experience in teaching, research, and writing. I have taught English language in a range of institutions and to different age-groups: at primary schools, at a secondary (grammar) school, at a college of further education, and at universities. My university teaching has encompassed a British university, universities in the United States, and a university in a country where English is a foreign language. I have been in English language research for over thirty years, and have directed a research unit (the Survey of English Usage) for the last twelve years. My books have ranged over various types of writing: monographs, reference works (including co-authorship of the standard reference grammar of English), textbooks, and books addressed to the general public. Numerous citations appear in this book. Many of them come from American and British newspapers, magazines, and books. Most are taken from two sources: ICE-GB (the British million-word component of the International Corpus of English, drawing on language used in the period 1990-3) and the Wall Street Journal (about three million words from this American newspaper for 1989, provided in a CD-ROM by the Association for Computational Linguistics Data Collection Initiative). ICE-GB was tagged and parsed with the assistance of programs devised by the TOSCA Research Group (University of Nijmegen) under the direction of Professor Ian Aarts. ICE-GB was compiled and computerized, with extensive mark-up, by researchers at the Survey of English Usage, who also undertook substantial manual work on the outputs of the TOSCA programs as well as manual pre-editing for parsing. The following Survey researchers were involved in the creation of ICE-GB or in the subsequent grammatical processing: Judith Broadbent, Justin Buckley, Yanka Gavin, Marie Gibney, Ine Mortelmans, Gerald Nelson, Ni Yibin, Andrew Rosta, Oonagh Sayce, Laura Tollfree, Ian Warner, PREFACE Vlad Zegarac. I am especially grateful to Gerald Nelson for overseeing the compilation of ICE-GB and the grammatic ...