Oxford Modern English Grammar

522 Pages·2021·4.37 MB·English

Oxford Modern English Grammar

Bas Aarts is Professor of English Linguistics and Director of the Survey of English
Usage at University College London. His previous books include Small Clauses in
English: The Nonverbal Types (Mouton de Gruyter, 1992); The Verb in
Contemporary English , co-edited with Charles F. Meyer (Cambridge University
Press, 1995); English Syntax and Argumentation (Palgrave, 1997, 2001, 2008);
Investigating Natural Language: Working with the British Component of the
International Corpus of English , co-authored with Gerald Nelson and Sean Wallis
(John Benjamins, 2002); Fuzzy Grammar: A Reader , co-edited with David Denison,
Evelien Keizer, and Gergana Popova (Oxford University Press, 2004); The Handbook
of English Linguistics , co-edited with April McMahon (Blackwell, 2006); and
Syntactic Gradience: The Nature of Grammatical Indeterminacy (Oxford University
Press, 2007). He is one of the founding editors of the journal English Language and
Linguistics .

Oxford Modern English Grammar

Bas Aarts

Department of English Language and Literature University College London

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX 2 6DP
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Typeset by Glyph International, Bangalore, India
Printed in Great Britain
on acid-free paper by
Clays Ltd., St Ives plc

ISBN 978–0–19–953319–0

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

In memory of my mother Sjé Aarts-Postmes (1934–2008)

Contents

List of figures

List of tables

Preface

Notational conventions and abbreviations

Abbreviations

Part I: The basics

Chapter 1: An overview of English grammar

Part II: Form and function

Chapter 2: Word structure and word-formation

Chapter 3: Word classes and simple phrases

Chapter 4: Grammatical functions, semantic roles, and tree diagrams

Part III: Phrase and clause patterns

Chapter 5: Complex phrases and coordination

Chapter 6: Clause types and negation

Chapter 7: Finite subordinate clauses

Chapter 8: Non-finite and verbless subordinate clauses

Part IV: Grammar and meaning

Chapter 9: Tense and aspect

Chapter 10: Mood

Chapter 11: Information structuring

Appendix 1: English irregular verbs

Appendix 2: The structure of the ICE-GB corpus

Notes and further reading

List of sources of examples

References

Subject Index

Lexical Index

List of figures

Figure 2.1: The field of morphology

Figure 3.1: The subclassification of English verbs

List of tables

Table
2.1:
The person system

Table
2.2:
The paradigm for the regular verb INSULT

Table
2.3:
The paradigm for the irregular verb BREAK

Table
2.4:
The progressive, perfect, and passive constructions

Table
2.5:
The present tense forms of the verb BE

Table
2.6:
Non-finite clauses

Table
2.7:
Plural-formation

Table
2.8:
The case forms of personal pronouns

Table
2.9:
The inflectional forms of adjectives and adverbs

Table
2.10:
Some common derivational suffixes

Table
2.11:
Some common derivational prefixes

Table
2.12:
Compound nouns

Table
2.13:
Compound verbs

Table
2.14:
Compound adjectives

Table
2.15:
Compound prepositions

Table
2.16:
Compound adverbs

Table
2.17:
Combining forms

Table
3.1:
Word classes

Table
3.2:
Some common nominal suffixes

Table
3.3:
The distributional properties of typical nouns

Table
3.4:
Pronoun subclasses

Table
3.5:
Reflexive pronouns

Table
3.6:

Reciprocal pronouns

Table
3.7:
Relative pronouns

Table
3.8:
Interrogative pronouns

Table
3.9:
Demonstrative pronouns

Table
3.10:
Indefinite pronouns

Table
3.11:
Determinatives

Table
3.12:
The distributional properties of typical determinatives

Table
3.13:
The distributional properties of typical adjectives

Table
3.14:
The modal auxiliaries

Table
3.15:
The perfect construction

Table
3.16:
The progressive construction

Table
3.17:
The passive construction

Table
3.18:
Uses of dummy DO

Table
3.19:
Prepositions

Table
3.20:
Complex prepositions

Table
3.21:
Postpositions

Table
3.22:
Deverbal prepositions

Table
3.23:
Subordinating conjunctions

Table
4.1:
Grammatical functions

Table
4.2:
The properties of typical Subjects

Table
4.3:
The properties of typical Direct Objects

Table
4.4:
A selection of transitive verbs

Table
4.5:
The properties of typical Indirect Objects

Table
4.6:
A selection of ditransitive verbs

Table

4.7:
A selection of linking verbs

Table
4.8:
A selection of complex transitive verbs

Table
4.9:
The distributional properties of typical Predicative Complements

Table
4.10:
The distributional properties of PPCs

Table
4.11:
A selection of verbs licensing PPCs

Table
4.12:
The distributional properties of typical Adjuncts

Table
4.13:
Semantic roles

Table
5.1:
Grammatical functions at phrase level

Table
5.2:
Determiners in noun phrases

Table
5.3:
Predeterminers in noun phrases

Table
5.4:
Complements in noun phrases

Table
5.5:
Adjuncts in noun phrases