292 Further readingusage. But usage manuals should in general be treated with caution, because many
of the best-known ones are dogmatic, uninformed, and much more out of date than
you might think. For example, much of the content of The Elements of Style by
William Strunk & E. B. White (4th edn; Allyn & Bacon, 2000) is about a hundred
years old (Strunk was born in 1869 and had published the first version of this slim
book by 1918); its advice is often ludicrously old-fashioned, rooted in claims about
'correctness' that cannot be taken seriously.
Practical matters like punctuation and spelling are not systematically covered in
the present book. Our concern has been rather to provide the grammatical basis on
which a better understanding of punctuation could be based (there is no profit in
being told that it is unacceptable to put a comma between subject and predicate if
you cannot identify the subject and the predicate). But there are many good practi
cal guides to punctuation in various works for writers, e.g., the MLA Handbook
fo r Writers of Research Papers (6th edn, ed. Joseph Gibaldi; New York: Modem
Language Association, 2003 ), and particularly The Chicago Manual of Style (15th
edn; University of Chicago Press, 2003). There is a thorough and more theoretical
treatment of punctuation in Ch. 20 of CGEL.
One of the best practical investments a student of English can make is to pur
chase a good dictionary or to become well acquainted with one that is regularly
accessible in a library. Most university libraries will have the greatest of all dic
tionaries of English: the Oxfo rd English Dictionary (2nd edn, 20 vols., 1989), a
crucial scholarly resource for the study of English and its history, generally
known as the OED. For American English specifically, the staunchly descriptive
We bster's Third New International Dictionary is deservedly a classic, and The
American Heritage Dictionary is also very useful. For purchase and everyday use
by students, a number of publishers including CUP, OUP, HarperCollins, and
Macmillan offer excellent, compact, affordable, up-to-date, descriptively oriented
dictionaries.
For linguistics students
The review article by Peter Culicover (Language 80 (2004): 127-41) relates CGEL,
and thus indirectly this book, to current issues in linguistics. James McCawley's
encyclopaedic work The Syntactic Phenomena of English (2nd edn; University of
Chicago Press, 1998) is an excellent introduction to the analysis of a wide range of
syntactic facts in transformational-generative terms. Our discussion of the impor
tant distinction between general (universal) and language-particular definitions
(Ch. 1) draws on ideas of John Lyons (see 'Towards a "notional" theory of the
"parts of speech"', Journal of Linguistics 2 (1966): 209-36; expanded reprinting in
his Natural Language and Universal Grammar, CUP, 1991).
Our analysis of the verb (Ch. 3), the clause (Ch. 4) and the noun (Ch. 5) rests on
a vast literature. One indication of this is that whole books have been written on
most of the individual classificational features relevant to the grammar of verb
phrases and noun phrases; CUP has published Aspect (Bernard Comrie, 1976), Case