Oxford Modern English Grammar Bas Aarts is Professor of English Linguistics and Director of the Survey of English Usage at University College London. His previous books include Small Clauses in English: The Nonverbal Types (Mouton de Gruyter, 1992); The Verb in Contemporary English , co-edited with Charles F. Meyer (Cambridge University Press, 1995); English Syntax and Argumentation (Palgrave, 1997, 2001, 2008); Investigating Natural Language: Working with the British Component of the International Corpus of English , co-authored with Gerald Nelson and Sean Wallis (John Benjamins, 2002); Fuzzy Grammar: A Reader , co-edited with David Denison, Evelien Keizer, and Gergana Popova (Oxford University Press, 2004); The Handbook of English Linguistics , co-edited with April McMahon (Blackwell, 2006); and Syntactic Gradience: The Nature of Grammatical Indeterminacy (Oxford University Press, 2007). He is one of the founding editors of the journal English Language and Linguistics . Oxford Modern English Grammar Bas Aarts Department of English Language and Literature University College London Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX 2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. 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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 the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Data available Typeset by Glyph International, Bangalore, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Clays Ltd., St Ives plc ISBN 978–0–19–953319–0 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 In memory of my mother Sjé Aarts-Postmes (1934–2008) Contents List of figures List of tables Preface Notational conventions and abbreviations Abbreviations Part I: The basics Chapter 1: An overview of English grammar Part II: Form and function Chapter 2: Word structure and word-formation Chapter 3: Word classes and simple phrases Chapter 4: Grammatical functions, semantic roles, and tree diagrams Part III: Phrase and clause patterns Chapter 5: Complex phrases and coordination Chapter 6: Clause types and negation Chapter 7: Finite subordinate clauses Chapter 8: Non-finite and verbless subordinate clauses Part IV: Grammar and meaning Chapter 9: Tense and aspect Chapter 10: Mood Chapter 11: Information structuring Appendix 1: English irregular verbs Appendix 2: The structure of the ICE-GB corpus Notes and further reading List of sources of examples References Subject Index Lexical Index List of figures Figure 2.1: The field of morphology Figure 3.1: The subclassification of English verbs List of tables Table 2.1: The person system Table 2.2: The paradigm for the regular verb INSULT Table 2.3: The paradigm for the irregular verb BREAK Table 2.4: The progressive, perfect, and passive constructions Table 2.5: The present tense forms of the verb BE Table 2.6: Non-finite clauses Table 2.7: Plural-formation Table 2.8: The case forms of personal pronouns Table 2.9: The inflectional forms of adjectives and adverbs Table 2.10: Some common derivational suffixes Table 2.11: Some common derivational prefixes Table 2.12: Compound nouns Table 2.13: Compound verbs Table 2.14: Compound adjectives Table 2.15: Compound prepositions Table 2.16: Compound adverbs Table 2.17: Combining forms Table 3.1: Word classes Table 3.2: Some common nominal suffixes Table 3.3: The distributional properties of typical nouns Table 3.4: Pronoun subclasses Table 3.5: Reflexive pronouns Table 3.6: Reciprocal pronouns Table 3.7: Relative pronouns Table 3.8: Interrogative pronouns Table 3.9: Demonstrative pronouns Table 3.10: Indefinite pronouns Table 3.11: Determinatives Table 3.12: The distributional properties of typical determinatives Table 3.13: The distributional properties of typical adjectives Table 3.14: The modal auxiliaries Table 3.15: The perfect construction Table 3.16: The progressive construction Table 3.17: The passive construction Table 3.18: Uses of dummy DO Table 3.19: Prepositions Table 3.20: Complex prepositions Table 3.21: Postpositions Table 3.22: Deverbal prepositions Table 3.23: Subordinating conjunctions Table 4.1: Grammatical functions Table 4.2: The properties of typical Subjects Table 4.3: The properties of typical Direct Objects Table 4.4: A selection of transitive verbs Table 4.5: The properties of typical Indirect Objects Table 4.6: A selection of ditransitive verbs Table 4.7: A selection of linking verbs Table 4.8: A selection of complex transitive verbs Table 4.9: The distributional properties of typical Predicative Complements Table 4.10: The distributional properties of PPCs Table 4.11: A selection of verbs licensing PPCs Table 4.12: The distributional properties of typical Adjuncts Table 4.13: Semantic roles Table 5.1: Grammatical functions at phrase level Table 5.2: Determiners in noun phrases Table 5.3: Predeterminers in noun phrases Table 5.4: Complements in noun phrases Table 5.5: Adjuncts in noun phrases