Customer Reviews

Hardcover, Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is an excellent descriptive grammar of the English language. A few months ago I compared several English grammars side-by-side, and this was one of the top two, the other being Quirk et al.'s far more [costly]work. In general, every construction is discussed in terms of a grammatical analysis (theory-neutral), quantitative analysis, and a functional analysis of the quantitative results. I've found the functional descriptions to be especially helpful.

The years of work that went into this book have come to fruition in a stunning wealth of findings that will be indispensable in understanding the inner workings of English and of language in general. This is not a grammar textbook, as one reviewer seems to have mistaken it for. This is a description of English based on an immense corpus of authentic English text taken from spoken conversation, literature, academia, and news, in Britain and the U.S. For the corpus findings alone this book is worth every cent of its prestigious sticker price; there are many surprises and implications for English teachers, grammarians, linguists, and anyone who has a stake in British/American English language stereotypes. As a teacher of English for speakers of other languages, I can say that this book has been a serious eye opener, and has caused me to rethink content and how it is presented. When compared to a dreadful many English-learning materials (grammar texts, ESL texts, etc.), the corpus findings illuminate alarming discrepancies between how English really works, and how English is taught. This book provides, for example, the most commonly used verbs within registers, demonstrates how certain verbs have tendencies to appear in only one tense (or tense-aspect combination) or voice, and reveals that ellipsis (omission of a grammatically necessary part of the sentence, for example, "I want to," or "Feeling well?") occurs more often in British English than in American English. It is an invaluable resource, as well, for unexpected questions about things such as why relative pronouns can sometimes be omitted (a lady I know), but sometimes cannot (a lady who sings). Corpus linguistics can and should play a central role in describing and teaching language. The Longman Grammar is a mammoth achievement.

This work redefines the English language. Working with a corpus of more than 40 million words, the authors conform every important grammatical point of the English language with its frequency in British and American speaking and writing. As a professional language tester, one of my greatest problems is the validation of my products. While I design products that withstand validation scrutiny, I have to admit, until now much of my success has been based on intuition rather than science. The LCSWE will be a tremendous boon to my work, as it should be to the work of professional English language testers the world over.

I think that everybody who buys this books knows what he is looking for (or at least I hope so), not confusing it with an handbook or a traditional reference grammar. I think that the book achives the goal in a large extent (and, as I can guess from the long introduction, it has a strong scientific base underlaying) for teachers, writers and other specialists but I, as an english student (I use english a lot for my professional job and want to improve my level), don't find it so useful. In detail, I think that there is too much analisys, too much data and very poor synthesis. The conclusion is that I use it for very, very specific details but prefer to spend my time working with "Quirk, A comprehensive grammar..." to develop a stronger and structured knowledge of english grammar.

My review is based on one month- not intensive use- of the book: I hope my opinion may change going deeper with reading.

This book is not for casual readers. It is also not for ordinary students. This is a very through book.

Even though the item is shipped from Argentina, it is far less expensive than the UK and the USA. Only a couple of negligible dents on the cover cardboard box, but the book is OK.

If you are a teacher, student or a writer seeking guidance, this is not the book which I would suggest, as it's really not prescriptive at all. It's chock full of frequency data wrt various grammatical constructs. It's like reading the census data, if you know what I mean. You'll be left out in netherspace, to basically extract the rules by yourself. Would much rather suggest using your hard earned dollar to buy the "Comprehensive Grammar ..." by Quirk to get some real guidelines. However, if you like statistics, buy this book, you'll love it ...