Approaches to English Clause Grammar

What is it about?

This book is not a complete grammar of the English language. It will have little to say about significant features of English grammar such as the parts of speech, the syntax of phrases, the rules governing concord and other aspects of the system. It is not that these are unimportant to the topic of the clause grammar of English, however they have received extensive coverage in the excellent reference books on English grammar that have been published over the past few decades, such as the Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (Quirk et al. 1985), the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (Biber et al. 1999) the Collins Cobuild Grammar (Sinclair 1990) and the Cambridge Grammar of English (Huddleston and Pullum 2002). Rather, the scope of this book is constrained to the English clause system from the perspective of clause combination. How the grammar of clause combination functions in English, and how the system patterns and develops both in the contemporary language and over historical time, is a less studied area of English grammar, though of great importance to understanding the system.

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Why is it important?

It shows how diverse current approaches to the study of grammar can be