Analyzing the Grammar of English offers a descriptive analysis of the indispensable elements of English grammar. Designed to be covered in one semester, this textbook starts from scratch and takes nothing for granted beyond a reading and speaking knowledge of English. Extensively revised to function better in skills-building classes, it includes more interspersed exercises that promptly test what is taught, simplified and clarified explanations, greatly expanded and more diverse activities, and a new glossary of over 200 technical terms.

Analyzing the Grammar of English, Third Edition is the only English grammar to view the sentence as a strictly punctuational constuct—anything that begins with a capital letter and ends with a period, a question mark, an exclamation mark, or three dots—rather than a syntactic one, and to load, in consequence, all the necessary syntactic analysis onto the clause and its constituents.

It is also one of the very few English grammars to include—alongside multiple examples of canonical or "standard" language—occasional samples of stigmatized speech to illustrate grammar points.

Students and teachers in courses of English grammatical analysis, English teaching methods, TESOL methods, and developmental English will all benefit from this new edition.

Thanks to ildi

 

This book offers a perspective on the structure of human language. The fundamental issue it addresses is the proper balance between syntax and semantics, between structure and derivation, and between rule systems and lexicon. It argues that the balance struck by mainstream generative grammar is wrong. It puts forward a new basis for syntactic theory, drawing on a wide range of frameworks, and charts new directions for research. In the past four decades, theories of syntactic structure have become more abstract and syntactic derivations have become more complex. The book traces this development through the history of contemporary syntactic theory, showing how much it has been driven by theory-internal rather than empirical considerations. It develops an alternative that is responsive to linguistic, cognitive, computational, and biological concerns. At the core of this alternative is the Simpler Syntax Hypothesis: the most explanatory syntactic theory is one that imputes the minimum structure necessary to mediate between phonology and meaning. A consequence of this hypothesis is a richer mapping between syntax and semantics than is generally assumed. Through analyses of grammatical phenomena, some old and some new, the book demonstrates the empirical and conceptual superiority of the Simpler Syntax approach.