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PRACTICAL ENGLISH USAGE Michael Swan PRACTICAL ENGLISH USAGE Second Edition International Student's Edition Oxford University Press Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Sao Paulo Shanghai Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto with an associated company in Berlin OXFORD and OXFORD ENGLISH are trade marks of Oxford University Press ISBN 0 19 442146 5 (paperback) © Michael Swan 1980, 1995, 1996 First published 1980 (reprinted twenty-six times) Second edition 1995 Eighth impression 1998 International Student's Edition 1996 Eighth impression 2002 No unauthorized photocopying 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 nghts organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the ELT 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 Any websites referred to in this publication are in the public domain and their addresses are provided by Oxford University Press for information only. Oxford University Press disclaims any responsibility for the content. Typeset in Adobe Utopia and Franklin Gothic by Tradespools Ltd, Frome, Somerset Printed in Hong Kong Dedication To John Eckersley, who first encouraged my interest in this kind of thing. I ( Contents page Acknowledgements ix Introduction xi List of entries xiii Language terminology xxi Phonetic alphabet Practical English Usage 1 Index 631 Acknowledgements So many people have helped me to write this revised edition that I am no longer totally sure of my claim to be its author. Keith Mitchell and Gareth Watkins both gave the typescript meticulous attention; their line-by-line comments, arid their help with difficult problems of analysis and description, were invaluable, and have resulted in a large number of important corrections and improvements. I am no less grateful to the other scholars who were kind enough to read and comment on the entire typescript, and who have made an enormous contribution to the clarity, accuracy and completeness of the finished text: Mike McCarthy, Ian Thompson, Catherine Walter, John Algeo and Sharon Hilles. The latter three deserve my additional thanks for dealing so patiently and tactfully with my attempts to describe American English. Ray Woodall, Frank Keenan, Jeremy Clear and David Lott of the Oxford University Press were kind enough to give me access to data from the British National Corpus; this material helped to solve a number of problems (if sometimes invalidating my solutions to others). I am also deeply indebted to Norman Coe and Michio Kawakami, whose detailed comments on the first edition have helped me very substantially with the preparation of the second; and to the many other colleagues and correspondents without whose suggestions and advice almost every page of this book would have less to offer. To the following, and those others whose names have not survived the rigours of my filing system, my most grateful thanks: Gerry Abbott, Spencer Allman, Rune Andersen, Tsutomu Aoi, Piotr Bakowski, David Banks, Reinald Baumhauer, Joshua Bear, Franz J Braun, G Brisou, J Brondel, Lilijana Burcar, Maria Cecilia Carattoli, Jung Chang, J F Chapin, Javier Chico, K K Roy Choudhury, Doreen Cooper, Sven-Inge Dahlman, Jo-Ann Delaney, Zhou Di, Michel Dupagne, John Eastwood, John Eckersley, M T Edwards, Ralph Erkelenz, Tim Eyres, Rauf Farouquee, Blake Finley, Steve Flinders, Yoshiteru Fuku, Agatha Gewirtz, Sue Girolami, J G Goble, Lucyna Golebiowska, Huang Yao Hai, Sylvia Harratt, Rita Hartono, J Hatch, Jill and Charlie Hadfield, Yvonne Haueter, Stephan Hegglin, Mark Helme, Liesel Hermes, Hanns Hofer, Mavis Holstein, Kenji Hosoda, Takahiro Hosokawa, Francoise Houdart, Rudi Huber, Kyoichi Iwase, Zador Jeno, Pierre Juge, Franz Keller, David Keyho, Roy Kingsbury, Szilvia KomlOdi, Julius KorbaS,Turnay Korna, S Kumar, Kikuko Kunikata, Shirley Larsen, Charles Lowe, Richard MacAndrew, Neil P MacPhee, Jonathan Marks, Maurizio Martorelli, Barbara Mather, Greg Matheson, James P McDonnell, Kirk McElhearn, Mary McIntosh, Shin-ichi Miura, Jill Moore, Tatsuhide Mori, Ray Murphy, Kieran O'Halloran, Ali Ihsan Ozeroglu, Lewis Paines, Christine Pasani, Stefano Piantino, Simon Pocock, Siegfried Pokorny, Chan Pui-yim, Lam Pun, Angus Rose, Raul Rueda, E Santos, J Sauvanet, Silke Schade, Baby Sebastian, Yu Sheng-zhen, Christiane Sieche, Ottmar K Siegrist, Guido Smanio, E Stabetsi, R Sundaresan, Aira Suormala, H A Swan, Ruth Swan, Edmund Swylan, Santiago Tho, F Tsuchiya, Hideko Uezono, Penny Ur, Isabelle Vay, Koichi Watanabe, Annie Watson, Paul Westney, page ix Acknowledgements J Williams, L Winkel, D V Woodman, Hiroko Yamamoto, Chao Yang, Shigeto Yawata, Zeng Yiting, Tao Zhanyong. I must reacknowledge my debt to those whose help with the preparation of the first edition continues as a contribution to the second: Jonathan Blundell, Anthony Cowie, Alan Duff, Christine Forster, Michael Macfarlane, Nigel Middlemiss, Jonathan Price, Christina Ruse, Loreto Todd, Philip Tregidgo and Catherine Walter. There is not enough space to mention all the grammarians and other linguists on whose work I have drawn, even if I had a complete record of my borrowings; but I must at least pay homage to the monumental Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, by Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech and Svartvik (Longman 1985), whose authoritative account of the facts of English structure and usage constitutes an essential source of information for anyone writing pedagogic grammar materials today. It is with particular pleasure that I express my affectionate and deeply-felt gratitude to Stewart Melluish of Oxford University Press. Without his deployment of the many qualities that distinguish editors from authors, including heroic calm, unfailing courtesy and monumental patience, this book would still be far from finished. Finally, my thanks to Catherine, Mark and Helen for their support and tolerance during the writing of this book, which has separated me from them for too many hours over too many years. page x Introduction The purpose of this book English, like all languages, is full of problems for the foreign learner. Some of these points are easy to explain - for instance, the formation of questions, the difference between since and for, the meaning of after all. Other problems are more tricky, and cause difficulty even for advanced students and teachers. How exactly is the present perfect tense used? When do we use past tenses to be polite? What are the differences between at, on and in with expressions of place? We can say a chair leg-why not *a girl leg? What are the real rules for the use of like and as? When can we use the expression do so? When is the used with superlatives? Is unless the same as if not? What are the differences between come and go, between each and every, between big, large and great, between fairly, quite, rather and pretty? Is it correct to say There's three more bottles in the fridge? How do you actually say 3 x 4 = 12? And so on, and so on. This book is a practical reference guide to questions of this kind. It deals with over 600 points which regularly cause problems for foreign students of English. Most of the points treated are grammatical, but there are also explanations of a certain number of common vocabulary problems. Level The book is intended for intermediate and advanced students, and for teachers of English. Being a reference book, it contains information at various levels, ranging from relatively simple points to quite advanced problems. Organisation Problems are mostly explained in short separate entries; the book is more like a dictionary than a grammar in form. This makes it possible to give a clear complete treatment of each point, and enables the user to concentrate just on the question he or she needs information about. Entries are arranged alphabetically by title and numbered in sequence; a comprehensive index shows where each point can be found. Approach and style I have tried to make the presentation as practical as possible. Each entry contains an explanation of a problem, examples of correct usage, and (when this is useful) examples of typical mistakes. More complicated items are divided into separate entries: a general explanation first, followed by more complete information for advanced students and teachers. Explanations are, as far as possible, in simple everyday language. Where it has been necessary to use grammatical terminology, I have generally preferred to use traditional terms that are well known and easy to understand. Some of these terms (e.g. future tense) would be regarded as unsatisfactory by academic grammarians, but I am not writing for specialists. There is a dictionary of the language terminology used in the book on pages xxi-xxix. page xi Introduction The kind of English described The explanations deal mainly with standard modern British English, and the examples are as realistic as I can make them. Stylistic differences (e.g. between formal and informal usage, or spoken and written language) are mentioned where this is appropriate. A good deal of information is given about American usage, but the book is not intended as a systematic guide to American English. Correctness If we say that a form is 'incorrect', we can mean two different things. We may be referring to a form like *I have seen her yesterday, which normally only occurs in the English of foreigners; or we may be talking about a form like ain't, which is used in speech by many British and American people, but which does not occur in the standard dialects and is not usually written. In this book, I am mainly concerned with the first sort of 'incorrectness' (the differences between British or American English and 'foreign' English), but I have mentioned a few examples of the second kind. Sometimes a form is used by some educated people, but considered wrong by others (e.g. me in It was me that found your keys). When this is the case, I have said so, but I have not usually tried to suggest who is right. How to use the book This is a reference book, not a systematic course in English grammar. It will be most useful to a student who has made a mistake and wants to find out why it is wrong, or to a teacher who is looking for a clear explanation of a difficult point of grammar or vocabulary. The best way to find a point is to look in the index at the back: most problems are indexed under several different names, so it is not usually difficult to locate quickly the entry you need. (For instance, if you want to know why we say I'm not used to driving on the left instead of *I'm not used to drive on the left, you can find the number of the section where this is explained by looking in the index under 'used', 'be used', `to' or ' -ing forms'.) Other reference books This book gives explanations of individual points of usage, but does not show how the separate points 'fit together'. For a systematically organised account of the whole of English grammar, students should consult a book such as A Student's Grammar of the English Language, by Greenbaum and Quirk (Longman), the Longman English Grammar, by L.G. Alexander, or the Oxford Guide to English Grammar, by John Eastwood. For a detailed treatment of English vocabulary, see the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English, the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English or the Collins Cobuild English Language Dictionary. page xii