Principles Of English Grammar

This text gives broad, up-to-date coverage of English grammatical facts and related concepts of introductory linguistics, emphasizing argumentation and motivation for empirically-based grammatical analyses without theoretical debates. It treats the prescriptive/descriptive distinction, phonology, morphology, word classes, phrase structure analysis of both simple sentences and a variety of complex sentences, grammatical relations, and anaphora (pronouns and pronoun-like elements).

"In the first part of the book there is a review of some of the main points of English syntax, followed by a discussion of English verbs in terms of 'semantic types'. About thirty of these types are examined, including verbs of Motion, of Giving, of Thinking, of Speaking, of Liking, and of Trying. In the last part of the book the author looks in detail at five grammatical topics: complement clauses, which can fill subject or object slot in a main clause; the question of transitivity and causatives; passives of all kinds; promotion of a non-subject to subject slot, as in Dictionaries sell well; and the relation between constructions such as They walked and They had a walk, She punched him and She gave him a punch, and He looked and He took a look." -- Back cover.

This book was first published in 1954, A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles is a valuable contribution to the field of English Language and Linguistics.