English Parts of Speech

Since the present textbook is meant for students of English and prospective teachers of English, its aim is to provide an account of English morphology which would be both founded on theory and also applicable in practice. To meet both the academic and the practical demands, we based our text on the systemic approach as offered by R. Quirk and S. Greenbaum in their University Grammar of English, and supplemented it by drawing on less academic, but more practical grammars by L. G. Alexander, A. J. Thomson and A. V. Martinet, L. Duskova et al., C. E. Eckersley and J. M. Eckersley, and others, who put more stress on the functional or the communicative aspect of the grammatical phenomena under consideration. We are well aware of the fact that in English it is rather difficult to draw a dividing line between morphology and syntax, nevertheless we are convinced that our English Parts of Speech will give Czech students an opportunity to study a subsystem of the English language in a way they are more familiar with than any other.

Recently two prominent English grammars have appeared: BlBER, D., S. JOHANSON, G. Leech, S. Conrad and E. Finegan (1999): Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English, Harlow; and HUDDLESTON, R. AND G. K. PULLUM (2002): The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, Cambridge. Both the grammars are based on vast corpora of written and spoken language and reveal new aspects of the use of English in everyday speech, in mass media, in fiction, and in scholarly communication. However interesting these new findings may be for a student of English, the authors of the present book have not been able to incorporate them in the text, and for special issues they refer the reader to the above two modern grammars reflecting the present stage of English.