A practical english grammar - Vyssaja skola 1978
Preface
This book, as the title implies, is intended to give practical aid to the student of English in his search for explanations and rules in connection with the construction of sentences. It takes into account much of the work done by linguistic scientists in recent years on English grammar, but cannot be said to belong in any precise way to any one school of analysis.
It is addressed to the intermediate or advanced student of English who has mastered the basic grammatical patterns through the kind of inductive study and practice that has become classic in the last decade or so and who now wants some overt explanation or exposition of what he has learned. The aim has been to explain what happens when English sentence-building elements are put together. First, of course, we have to define the sentence, and then we divide that entity into its two major parts, subject and predicate. Once this formidable task has been done, with whatever success, the other elements can be dealt with in more or less logical order. The subject is always some kind of nominal structure, and so this leads into a discussion of nouns and pronouns. Clauses as subjects are brought in later on. The predicate is always, or always contains, a verb. Therefore, once the predicate has been identified, the multifarious English verb structures can be discussed and explained, along with their associate objects and other kinds of complements. A great deal of space is given to subordinate verbs in the predicate (let X do something, get X to do it, see X do it or see X doing it, enjoy doing something, have X done, etc.). Then come structures of subordination and modification of all kinds, and a final brief discussion of structures beyond the sentence-discourse. All along, too, the various anaphoric, or “echo,” processes as they are called here, are explained and exemplified. The Table of Contents lists in detail the points that are covered in each of the 20 chapters which make up the book.
Each chapter ends with several short exercises, which are intended to be more diagnostic or evaluative than pedagogical. The student can test himself to see if he has understood the more important points presented in the chapter. Answers are given at the back of the book, but the student is urged not to consult them until he has tried to answer the problems out of his own knowledge. Additional exercise and check-up material is available in A Practical English Grammar Programmed Workbook. This workbook is designed specifically to be used in connection with The Practical English Grammar. English Grammar Exercises Books 1, 2, and 3, can also be used as supplementary exercise material. On page242 is a table showing specific exercises in these three books that can be used with each lesson of the two grammar books.
Writing a grammar is much like exploring the inside of a sphere: one finds that everything depends on everything else, and that most definitions turn out to be circular. We therefore tend to take the whole thing for granted right from' the beginning, and the student will find that the first chapter is one of the hardest in the book. If it is too much for him, he might skip it and concentrate on other sections that may not be as difficult.
We have retained, by and large, jthe traditional terminology, since this is the most likely to be familiar to both teacher and student: sentence, subject, predicate, noun, adjective, verb, adverb, gerund, infinitive, participle, and so on. The student will find, however, that some of the definitions are a bit narrower than he may be accustomed to: pronoun, for instance, is not just any word that replaces a noun (one, some, several, d few, etc.) but is one of a restricted set of words that are inflected for person, case, and gender: (I, me, you, he, him, she, etc.). The other words that replace nouns are called “substitute nouns.” Adjective is not just any word that modifies a noun, but one that is used both before the noun (the old man) and after linking verbs (the man is old). Old-fashioned grammar saves its definition of the adjective by saying that anything that modifies a noun either is an adjective or is “being used as an adjective.” It seems more reasonable to admit that nouns, adverbs, and other parts of speech, in addition to adjectives, can modify nouns; this leads to a more realistic description of English syntax.
The usage described is standard, educated English of the present time. The overall orientation is American, but as most of the notorious differences between American and other varieties of English are limited to phonology and occasional lexical substitution (wrench vs. spanner, elevator vs. lift, etc.) and are thus quite superficial and trivial, the book will be useful in all English-speaking areas. The few syntactic differences (American do you have? vs. British have you? and the different handling of have got) are mentioned as they come up.
The level of formality represented by many of the rules is a bit higher than in ordinary conversation. This comes about because we are dealing primarily with the written style of the language. Spoken language is not emphasized as such, though occasional references are made to speech sounds and to pronunciation (a reference list of phonemic symbols used in this book is given on page xiv). It has been our aim to furnish to the student or the teacher some answers to the questions often asked during early language study but which, according to orthodox oral-aural methodology, are usually postponed until some later time. We still avoid “why?” questions, of course, since the only answer to “why?” in language is a historical one. We do, however, try to generalize the student’s knowledge and bring together related patterns so that he can safely extend his language competence by analogy to other structures in the language.
The works of Fries, Trager and Smith, James Sledd, Zandvoort, Francis, Fowler, Paul Roberts, and others have been freely consulted for both detail and overall orientation, but for the material presented here the authors alone are responsible. Martin Joos’s book, The English Verb (Madison, Wisconsin, 1964), was especially helpful in the section on verbs.
A Practical English Grammar is part of the Collier-Macmillan English Program, prepared by the Materials Development Staff of English Language Services, Inc., under the co-direction of Edwin T. Cornelius, Jr., and Willard D. Sheeler. It was written by Earle W. Brockman with the active assistance of George F. Sheldon.
Drawings are by James J. Hulley.