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Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
Sidney Greenbaum has long been a prominent name among the modern, academic grammarians, who study and describe the language as it really is written and spoken, rather than making statements about how language ought to be. This vast tome covers the whole field of current English and American English grammar in great detail. It gives all you will ever need to know on how sentences are put together, and has chapters on the differences between spoken and written English, word origins and semantics, word formation, phonetics, punctuation and spelling. Each begins with a summary of its contents, but most of the text is made up of numbered statements of fact followed by generous illustrations. These illustrations are taken from real-life use, many from large electronic collections of books, newspapers and recorded speech. This layout makes the book a good reference tool for both teachers and advanced students of English. Greenbaum claims the book is also written for the general reader. However, unless that reader is sufficiently at home with the subject they could easily be put off by an introductory comment such as: "In this chapter, 'text' refers to both spoken and written language. A written text is a stretch of writing, while a spoken text--here called a discourse--is a stretch of speech" or statements such as "Monotransitive prepositional verbs superficially resemble transitive phrasal verbs when the particle of the phrasal verb precedes the object, but only the particle of a phrasal verb can also follow the object." They would be better off starting with a more general introduction to the subject such as Frank Palmer's Grammar. --Julia Cresswell
Book Description
An authoritative new reference for English grammar
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
35 of 37 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
I read this book from front to back. It is a thorough treatment of English grammar. For those looking for a usage guide- do not look here as it is open to non-standard types of English. It would probably serve as a good reference book for writers, teachers and non-linguistic scholars who would appreciate the abundance of examples given. For the average reader, they will tire of the enumeration of boring, useless-to-most-people aspects of grammar. On the otherhand, if you're just curious about grammar, as I was, it can be very educational.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
10 reviews
92 of 93 people found the following review helpful
What a grammar book should be
25 Oct 2002
Format:Hardcover
As the other reviewer has said, this isn't a usage guide. It is partly a reference grammar, but also partly a textbook on the whole English language. Indeed, the title may be misleading, because most self-proclaimed grammars of English limit themselves to sentence-level syntax and a bit of morphology (inflections and such). Greenbaum includes chapters on phonology (the sounds of language) and morphology (word structure), and discourse (grammatical structure above the level of single sentences).
The material here is the most accurate you will find in a book directed at a general (non-linguistic) audience, and is essentially a condensed version of the material in *A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language*, of which Greenbaum was a co-author, and which remains the best one-volume reference grammar of English. It is a sad fact that most grammar books marketed to a general audience perpetuate factual inaccuracies about English grammar. Greenbaum gives you English the way it really works, without descending into the complexities of contemporary linguistic theory.
My one complaint about the book is not about its content but about its production quality. My copy, at least, is printed on cheap paper and the few graphics are not the sharpest. I expect more from a $45 book.
69 of 70 people found the following review helpful
Thorough treatment of English Grammar. Not a usage guide.
26 Jan 2000
Format:Hardcover
I read this book from front to back. It is a thorough treatment of English grammar. For those looking for a usage guide- do not look here. It would probably serve as a good reference book for writers, teachers and non-linguistic scholars who would appreciate the abundance of examples given. For the average reader, they will tire of the enumeration of boring, useless-to-most-people aspects of grammar. On the other hand, if you're just curious about grammar, as I was, it can be very educational.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Lacks completeness; difficult for reference
17 April 2010
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
First of all, I'm not a scholar. I wanted to learn greek, but found my English grammar lacking. In many areas this would certainly help in learning the grammar of a foreign language. The index uses sections rather than pages in looking up a subject. The sections can be quite long and finding the particular item may be timely. "Periphrastic tenses" for instance. I never could get a clear/complete definition of what this is. I still use it more than my other less complete/elementary grammar texts. But it is not ideal for what I need. I am still learning the layout of subject matter. It certainly is not intuitive--for a non-scholar anyway.
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