The Oxford Reference Grammar

420 Pages·2000·22.09 MB·English

by  Sidney Greenbaum

THE OXFORD REFERENCE GRAMMAR
Edmund Weiner is Principal Philologist of the Oxford English
Dictionary (2l)d edn), and is the author of The Oxford
Dictionary ofE nglish Grammar (with Sylvia Chalker) and
The Oxford Guide to English Usage (with Andrew Delahunty).

SIDNEY GREENBAUM
Edited by EDMUND WEINER
UNIVERSITY PRESS
OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 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
Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogota Buenos Aires Calcutta
Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul
Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai
Nairobi Paris Sao Paulo Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw
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
© The Oxford English Grammar, Sidney Greenbaum 1995
© text of The Oxford Reference Grammar, Edmund Weiner 2000
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
Database right Oxford University Press (makers)
First published 2000
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 0-19-860044-5
357910864
Designed by Jane Stevenson
Typeset in Minion and Franklin Gothic
by Alliance Phototypesetters, India
Printed by T. J. International, Pads tow
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 the syntax of pre
sent -day English that is chiefly focused on the standard varieties ofA merican 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 written to be accessible to non-specialists, but is organized with
the needs of students of the English language and related subjects especially in
mind. 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. The text of
each chapter is subdivided into smaller sections in order to keep the user
orientated at all times. Cross-references link topics mentioned to the places
where they are discussed in more detail. All grammatical terms used in the book
are highlighted in the text on their first occurrence in each chapter, apart from
very frequent, well-known terms such as noun, verb, etc. All terms are defined in
the Glossary at the end of the book, which also provides more discursive
explanations of the most important terms.
Numerous citations (quotations from actual spoken or written English)
appear in this book. These are important because they show that the grammatical
analysis corresponds with real language use and is not based solely on the
intuition of the grammarian. 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)
and the Wall Street Journal (about three million words from issues of this
American newspaper published in 1989, provided in a CD-ROM by the
Association for Computational Linguistics Data Collection Initiative). Citations
from ICE-GB are for language used during the years 1990-3. There are 500 texts
(samples) in ICE-GB, each text containing about 2,000 words, for a total of about
one million words. The spoken texts number 300. Fifty of the spoken texts are
scripted (written down and read aloud); the scripted texts are transcribed from
the spoken recordings. Many of the texts are composite; that is, they are
composed of several subtexts (shorter samples), such as a text comprising a
number of personal letters. (For a further explanation of the use of corpora in
grammatical study, see 1.11.1.)
All citations preserve the original wording. If anything is omitted (to avoid
irrelevant distractions), the omission is indicated by [. .. ]. Pauses are indicated by
... Citations from published material are usually followed by the author and work
in the case of a book, or simply the title of the periodical. Citations from
vi PREFACE
unpublished material (essays, examination scripts, and letters), and from
administrative regulations, government leaflets, etc. are followed by '[W]'. All
other citations are from spoken texts.
This book is based on chapters 1-6 of The Oxford English Grammar (1996).
The text follows that of the parent volume but has been broken up into smaller
subsections; this has sometimes occasioned the reordering and rewriting of
material. Some citations have been rearranged, a few have been omitted, and a
few have been shortened; precise references to the textual corpora have been
omitted or replaced by author and title or periodical title. All footnotes have been
moved into the main text as panels (labelled 'Note'), except for those suggesting
further reading, which have been given a section of their own at the end of the
book. Some paragraphs that give detailed syntactic information and are to some
extent parenthetic have been set off distinctively from the main text in panels
with headings that explain their function. The Glossary has been expanded to
cover all the technical terms used in the main text.
The revision follows the outline plan drawn up by the author of The Oxford
English Grammar, Sidney Greenbaum. It is a matter of great regret that he did not
live to edit the book himself and the editor's earnest wish is that it may serve the
purposes for which he intended it.
List of Tables and List of Figures viii
Pronunciation Table ix
Abbreviations and Symbols x
Part One: Introduction
1 The English language and its Grammar
Part Two: An Outline of Grammar 22
2 Sentences 22
3 The Constituents of Sentences 42
....................................................... -
4 Phrases and Words 65
Part Three: Word Classes 75
5 Nouns 75
6 Determiners, Pronouns, and Numerals 102
................................................................................................ ............................................................... -
7 Verbs 142
8 Adjectives, Adverbs, and Interjections 164
9 Conjunctions and Prepositions 185
Part Four: Phrases 193
10 Noun Phrases 193
11 Verb Phrases 236
12 Adjective Phrases, Adverb Phrases, and Prepositional Phrases 279
Part Five: Sentences and Clauses 301
13 Clause Relationships 301
14 Subordinate Clauses 325
............................................... -
15 Reported Speech 356
Further Reading 364
Glossary of Grammatical Terms 367
Index 393
List of Tables
Table 6.3.1 Primary pronouns 107
Table 6.3.2 Archaic second person forms 109
Table 6.13.1 Primary indefinite pronouns and determiners 133
Table 7.6.1 Classes of irregular verbs 154
List of Figures
Figure 10.2.1 Structure of a noun phrase 198
Figure 10.2.2 Premodifiers and NP heads 198
Figure 10.2.3 Postmodifiers and NP head: Sentence [3] 199
Figure 10.2.4 Postmodifiers and NP head: Sentence [4] 199
Figure 12.1.1 Structure of an adjective phrase 282
Figure 12.5.1 Structure of an adverb phrase 290
Figure 12.9.1 Structure of a prepositional phrase 296
Figure 13.2.1 Coordination of two main clauses: Sentence [1] 307
Figure 13.2.2 Coordination ofthree main clauses: Sentence [2] 307
Figure 13.4.1 Subordinate clause within a main clause:Sentence [5] 311
Figure 13.4.2 Coordination offinal subordinate clauses: Sentence [6] 312
Figure 13.4.3 Coordination of initial subordinate clauses: Sentence [7] 312
Figure 13.4.4 Subordination within subordination: Sentence [8] 312
Figure 13.4.5 Coordination within coordination: Sentence [9] 313
Figure 13.4.6 Initial subordinate clause linked to two main clauses: Sentence [10] 313
Figure 13.4.7 Final subordinate clause linked to two main clauses: Sentence [13] 313
Figure 13.4.8 Parenthetic and-clause containing coordination of subordinate clauses:
Sentence [14] 314
Figure 13.4.9 Embedded relative clause:Sentence [16] 315
Figure 13.4.10 Embedded coordinated clauses functioning as noun phrase complements:
Sentence [17] 315
Figure 13.4.11 Four to-infinitive clauses in asyndetic coordination: Sentence [18] 316
Consonants
voiceless
p pen s sit
t top S she
k cat tS chip
f few h he
e
thin
voiced
b but m man
d dog n no
9 get IJ ring
v van 1 leg
(5 this r red
z zoo w we
3 vision yes
d3 jar
Vowels
a cat a ago
a: arm (RP) arm (GA) AI my
E bed au how
a: (RP) her eI (RP) e: (GA) day
3 (GA) her au (RP) 0: (GA) no
sit E: hair (RP) hair (GA)
i: see la (RP) I (GA) near (RP) near (GA)
D (RP) a: (GA) hot JI boy
J: saw ua (RP) u (GA) poor (RP) poor (GA)
A run Ala (RP) AI (GA) tire (RP) tire (GA)
u put aua (RP) au (GA) sour (RP) sour (GA)
u: too
The pronunciation symbols follow those used in The New Shorter Oxford English
Dictionary.
RP (Received Pronunciation) is an accent that is typical of educated speakers of
British English, though by no means all educated speakers use it. GA (General
American) is an abstraction from what is typical of English pronunciation in the United
States in contrast to RP. Most of the differences for vowels between RP and GA are due
to the [r] being separately pronounced in GA after a vowel. Syllabic consonants
(consonants that constitute a syllable by themselves) are marked by a subscript vertical
line: Ll)..
Primary stress is marked by (') before the syllable, and secondary stress by (,) before
the syllable: 'capita,lize.
Abbreviations and Symbols
A adverbial
GA General American
ICE-GB British corpus ofICE (International Corpus of English)
M main clause
NP noun phrase
o
object
P predicative
pp prepositional phrase
RP Received Pronunciation
S subject
sub subordinate clause
V verb
() comment or explanation after citation; optional letter ( s) or word( s)
[] comment or explanation within citation; phonetic transcription
/I phonemic transcription