Further reading
In this short book we do not even try to incorporate all the bibliographical refer
ences that would be appropriate; to even sketch the vast array of scholarship on
English grammar from 1580 to the present would take a separate book. We will just
give some pointers to a few useful works for the student who wants to read further,
and signal a few of our most important intellectual debts in linguistics. I
For the general reader
This book is based on our much larger work The Cambridge Grammar of the
English Language (Rodney Huddleston & Geoffrey K. Pullum et aI ., CUP, 2002;
henceforth CGEL). That is the first place to turn to for further details of the analysis
we adopt.
An influential earlier work that inclines more to the older tradition in English
grammar is Randolph Quirk et aI., A Comprehensive Grammar of the English
Language (London: Longman, 1985); this was of great value to us in preparing
CGEL, but see Rodney Huddleston's critical review (Language 64 (1988): 345-54)
for a number of reasons for disagreeing with its analyses.
A still earlier grammar is Otto Jespersen's classic Modern English Grammar on
Historical Principles (7 vols.; London: AlIen & Unwin, 1909-49). Jespersen was a
radical rather than a traditionalist, and made many important innovative proposals,
too many of which were overlooked.
An example of a nineteenth-century grammar worth looking at is Henry Sweet,
New English Grammar (2 vols.; OUP, 1891). His statement that 'the rules of gram
mar have no value except as statements of facts: whatever is in general use in a lan
guage is for that very reason grammatically correct' (§ 12) expresses forthrightly the
point of view we state in Ch. I of this book. The prescriptive grammars of the twen
tieth century might have been more useful if they had paid more attention to Sweet
instead of simply trying to transmute personal prejUdice into authority.
The best usage manual we know is Merriam-We bster's Dictionary of English
Usage (Merriam-Webster, 1994), which contains a wealth of examples from print
sources and always draws its advice from scholarly study of the actual facts of
1 In our citations, 'CUP' means Cambridge University Press, 'oUP' means Oxford University Press,
'et aI.' means 'and other authors'. Publication details are shortened or omitted for extremely well
known works that are easy to find.29 1