The Oxford nglish Grammar SIDNEY GREENBAUM In memoriam OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Great Clarendon Street, Oxford 0x2 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 York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Oar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi Sao Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto 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 © Sidney Greenbaum 1996 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published by Oxford University Press 1996 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 0-19-861250-8 10 9 8 7 Printed in Great Britain by International Ltd Padstow, Cornwall FOR AVRAHAM AND MASHA Preface 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 present-day English that is chiefly focused on the standard varieties of American 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 unique in its coverage for native speakers of the language. It is written to be accessible to non-specialists, but students of the English language and related subjects will also find it of interest and value. 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. You may wish to read through a whole chapter or to consult particular sections. The Glossary at the end of the book will provide you with succinct explanations of terms that are frequently used in the book. In writing this book, I have drawn on my many years of experience in teaching, research, and writing. I have taught English language in a range of institutions and to different age-groups: at primary schools, at a secondary (grammar) school, at a college of further education, and at universities. My university teaching has encompassed a British university, universities in the United States, and a university in a country where English is a foreign language. I have been in English language research for over thirty years, and have directed a research unit (the Survey of English Usage) for the last twelve years. My books have ranged over various types of writing: monographs, reference works (including co-authorship of the standard reference grammar of English), textbooks, and books addressed to the general public. Numerous citations appear in this book. Many them come from American and British newspapers, magazines, and books. Most are taken from two sources: (the British million-word component of the International Corpus of English, drawing on language used in the period 1990-3) and the Wall Street Journal (about three million words from this American newspaper for 1989, provided in a CD-ROM by the Association for Computational Linguistics Data Collection Initiative). ICE-GB was tagged and parsed with the assistance of programs devised by the TOSCA Research Group (University of Nijmegen) under the direction of Professor Ian Aarts. ICE-GB was compiled and computerized, with extensive mark-up, by researchers at the Survey of English Usage, who also undertook substantial manual work on the outputs of the TOSCA programs as well as manual pre-editing for parsing. The following Survey researchers were involved in the creation of ICE-GB or in the subsequent grammatical processing: Judith Broadbent, Justin Buckley, Yanka Gavin, Marie Gibney, Mortelmans, Gerald Nelson, Ni Yibin, Andrew Oonagh Sayce, Laura Tollfree, Ian Warner, PREFACE I am especially grateful to Gerald Nelson for overseeing the compilation of and the grammatical processing. He is also responsible for drawing up the annotated list of sources for ICE-GB texts in the Appendix. The work on ICE-GB was supported in the main by grants from the Economic and Social Research Council (grant R000 23 2077), the Leverhulme Trust, and the Michael Marks Charitable Trust. Financial support was also received from the Sir Sigmund Sternberg Foundation and Pearson I am indebted to Akiva Quinn and Nick Porter, colleagues at the Survey, for ICECUP, a software concordance and search package, which I used extensively for searching ICE-GB for words and grammatical tags. I am also much indebted to Alex Chengyu Fang, another colleague at the Survey, for the application of two programs that he created: AUTASYS was used for tagging the Wall Street Journal Corpus, and so gave me access to grammatical information from an American corpus, and TQuery was invaluable for searching for structures in the parsed corpus. Thanks are due to a number of colleagues for their comments on one or more draft chapters: Judith Broadbent, Justin Buckley, Alex Chengyu Fang, Gerald Nelson, Ni Yibin, Andrew Rosta, Jan Svartvik, Vlad Zegarac. I am also grateful to Marie Gibney for typing the drafts. Contents List of Tables and Figures Pronunciation Table Abbreviations and Symbols Explanations of Corpora Citations 1 The English Language 2 The Scope and Nature of Grammar An Outline of Grammar 4 Word Classes 5 The Grammar of Phrases 6 Sentences and Clauses 7 Text 8 Words and their Meanings 9 The Formation of Words Sounds and Tunes 11 Punctuation 12 Spelling x xi xiii xiv 1 21 39 88 203 305 363 394 435 477 503 556 Notes Appendix: Sources of Citations in ICE-GB Glossary Index 577 601 615 637 of Tables Table 4.18.1 Classes of irregular verbs 127 Table 4.34.1 Primary pronouns 166 Table 4.34.2 Archaic second person forms 168 Table 4.44.1 Primary indefinite pronouns and determiners 193 Table 8.3.1 Brown, LOB, and rankings of the fifty most frequent words in present-day English 403 Table 9.37.1 Lexically conditioned in verbs 472 Table 10.3.1 English consonants 482 List of Figures Figure 2.5.1 Tree diagram 30 Figure 5.2.1 Structure of a noun phrase 209 Figure 5.2.2 and NP heads 210 Figure 5.2.3 and NP head: [3] 210 Figure 5.2.4 Postmodifiers and NP head: Sentence [4] 211 Figure 5.39.1 Structure of an adjective phrase 288 Figure 5.43.1 Structure of an adverb phrase 295 Figure 5.47.1 Structure a prepositional phrase 300 Figure 6.2.1 of two main clauses: Sentence 312 Figure 6.2.2 Co-ordination of three main clauses: Sentence [2] 312 Figure 6.4.1 Subordinate clause within a main clause: Sentence 316 Figure 6.4.2 Co-ordination of final subordinate clauses: Sentence [6] 316 Figure 6.4.3 Co-ordination of initial subordinate clauses: Sentence 316 Figure 6.4.4 Subordination within subordination: Sentence 317 Figure 6.4.5 Co-ordination within co-ordination: Sentence [9] 317 Figure 6.4.6 Initial subordinate clause linked to two main clauses: Sentence [10] 317 Figure 6.4.7 Final subordinate clause linked to two main clauses: Sentence [13] 318 Figure 6.4.8 Parenthetic containing co-ordination of subordinate clauses: Sentence [14] 318 Figure 6.4.9 Embedded relative clause: Sentence [16] 319 Figure 6.4.10 Embedded co-ordinated clauses functioning as noun phrase complements: Sentence [17] 319 Figure 6.4.11 Four to-infinitive clauses in asyndetic co-ordination: Sentence [18] 320 Figure 9.2.1 Structure of a complex word 440 Figure 10.6.1 Vowel chart 486 Pronunciation Table Consonants voiceless P t k f e voiced b d g V 5 z 3 Vowels a a: £ a: (RP) 3(GA) i: pen top cat few thin but dog get van this vision Jar cat arm (RP) arm (GA) bed her her sit see hot A saw run put s J h n 1 r w j (RP) e: (GA) so (RP) o: (GA) (RP) (GA) (RP) (GA) (RP) (GA) (RP) (GA) she chip he man n ring leg red we yes ago my how day no hair (RP) (GA) near (RP) near (GA) boy (RP) (GA) tire (RP) tire (GA) (RP) (GA) The pronunciation symbols follow those used in The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary and in the latest edition of The Concise Oxford 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. For PRONUNCIATION TABLE more detailed discussion of the pronunciation of consonants and vowels, see 10.3-8. Syllabic consonants (consonants that constitute a syllable by themselves) are marked by a subscript vertical line: 1, Primary stress is marked by (') before the syllable, and secondary stress by before the syllable: See 10.10-12. The ends of tone units are marked by vertical lines, and the nuclear syllable is in capitals: I've caught a The direction of the tone is shown by an arrow before the nuclear syllable. See f. [...]... internationally 3 The spread of English in the British Isles 4 The spread of English In other firstlanguage countries 6 1.4 1.5 1.6 The spread of English in secondlanguage countries 8 English pidgins and Creoles 11 English as an international language 12 The standard language (1.7-10) 1.7 1.8 Standard English 14 Variation In standard English 15 1.9 1.10 Correct English 16 Good English 17 Chapter 1 Summary English. .. in the Caribbean, there is a continuum from the most extreme form of Creole to the form that is closest to the standard language Linguists mark off the relative positions on the Creole continuum as the basilect (the furthest from the standard language), the mesolect, and the acrolect In such situations, most Creole speakers can vary their speech along the continuum and many are also competent in the. .. achieve the maximum international impact they chant and display their slogans in English. 9 The English taught to foreign learners is generally British or American English in their standard varieties Except for pronunciation the differences between the two are relatively minor, as indeed they are between the standard varieties in any of the countries where English is the majority first language The mass... Descriptive and prescriptive grammar 24 2.3 Theories of grammar 25 Chomsky and theoretical linguistics (2.4-6) 2.4 Grammar In the mind 26 2.5 Transformational-generative grammar 29 2.6 Grammatical and acceptable 2.9 The tradition of English grammatical writing 37 The study of grammar (2.7-9) 2.7 2.8 The data for grammar 35 Reasons for studying grammar 36 33 22 Chapter 2 Summary The word grammar is used variously,... recent Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, published in 1985, that extends to nearly 1,800 pages.1 In the concrete sense of the word grammar, a grammar is a book of one or more volumes We of course also use grammar for the contents of the book When we compare grammars for their coverage and accuracy, we are referring to the contents of the book: a grammar is a book on grammar, just as a history... dominate the country linguistically as well as in other respects, so that the indigenous population came to adopt English as their first or second language More importantly for the future of English, the numbers of the early settlers were swelled enormously by waves of immigration and even when the newcomers brought another language their descendants generally spoke ENGLISH THROUGHOUT THE WORLD 7 English. .. develops from a pidgin when the pidgin becomes the mother tongue of the community To cope with the consequent expansion of communicative functions, the vocabulary is increased and the grammar is elaborated There are about thirty-five English- based pidgins and Creoles, Englishbased because they draw heavily on English vocabulary.6 They can be divided into Atlantic and Pacific varieties The Atlantic varieties... which vary in their coverage and their accuracy The largest English dictionary is the scholarly twenty-volume Oxford English Dictionary, which traces the history of words and their meanings Similarly, there are large scholarly grammars, notably the seven-volume Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles, published at intervals between 1909 and 1949 and still consulted by scholars, and the more recent... Germanic The Danes came close to capturing the whole country, but were defeated overwhelmingly by the English under the leadership of King Alfred the Great The Treaty of Wedmore signedin the same year (878) confined the Danes to the east of a line roughly from London to Chester, an area known as the Danelaw There were further Danish invasions in the late ninth century, and finally from 1014 to 1042 the. .. independent countries Since the end of the Second World War English has been the foremost language for international communication The standard varieties of American and British English have influenced those of other countries where English is a first language and they have generally been the models taught to foreign learners In the past they have also been the models for English as a second language, . throughout the world (1.1-6) 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.7 1.8 English internationally 3 The spread of English in the British Isles 4 The spread of English In other first-. when the newcomers brought another language their descendants generally spoke ENGLISH THROUGHOUT THE WORLD 7 English as their first language. All the major