Customer Reviews

The Oxford English Grammar

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As the other reviewer has said, this isn't a usage guide. It is partly a reference grammar, but also partly a textbook on the whole English language. Indeed, the title may be misleading, because most self-proclaimed grammars of English limit themselves to sentence-level syntax and a bit of morphology (inflections and such). Greenbaum includes chapters on phonology (the sounds of language) and morphology (word structure), and discourse (grammatical structure above the level of single sentences).

The material here is the most accurate you will find in a book directed at a general (non-linguistic) audience, and is essentially a condensed version of the material in *A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language*, of which Greenbaum was a co-author, and which remains the best one-volume reference grammar of English. It is a sad fact that most grammar books marketed to a general audience perpetuate factual inaccuracies about English grammar. Greenbaum gives you English the way it really works, without descending into the complexities of contemporary linguistic theory.
My one complaint about the book is not about its content but about its production quality. My copy, at least, is printed on cheap paper and the few graphics are not the sharpest. I expect more from a $45 book.

I read this book from front to back. It is a thorough treatment of English grammar. For those looking for a usage guide- do not look here. It would probably serve as a good reference book for writers, teachers and non-linguistic scholars who would appreciate the abundance of examples given. For the average reader, they will tire of the enumeration of boring, useless-to-most-people aspects of grammar. On the other hand, if you're just curious about grammar, as I was, it can be very educational.

First of all, I'm not a scholar. I wanted to learn greek, but found my English grammar lacking. In many areas this would certainly help in learning the grammar of a foreign language. The index uses sections rather than pages in looking up a subject. The sections can be quite long and finding the particular item may be timely. "Periphrastic tenses" for instance. I never could get a clear/complete definition of what this is. I still use it more than my other less complete/elementary grammar texts. But it is not ideal for what I need. I am still learning the layout of subject matter. It certainly is not intuitive--for a non-scholar anyway.

I am seldom disappointed with Oxford language products, and this volume is certainly an excellent one. The book is logically formatted and is written clearly and concisely.
It is well worth the investment if you are looking for a comprehensive but accessible English reference.

The Oxford line of reference books is generally the best one can find. I was expecting the same quality of content and printing in this work as is found in their dictionaries, thesauri and other reference books. As a previous reviewer has stated, the paper is a bit cheap; but what matters to me more is the content. I do not understand why reference works would EVER discuss improper grammar. It should not be printed in any book, much less a reference book. I have no respect for those who try to make arguments for "the natural evolution of language," et cetera. People ALREADY know how to speak improperly, why would a grammar book give examples of such? It is almost as if this book were written for someone who had never heard "who should I write this letter to?" I imagine an English Lord in his castle, lying on a Chaise, reading this book and wondering why the "plebeians" employ such odd prepositional-pronoun separation; "And wherefore have they discarded the m?" I understand that this is not a usage guide, but - as a Germanist who loves language - I cannot imagine this book helping anyone improve their language skills. I would be irate if I were to purchase "The Duden German Grammar" and find that it did not distinguish between proper and colloquial grammar. Tell me, what purpose is a GRAMMAR REFERENCE book other than to help one understand a language's correct usage? This book should be called "Printed Examples of Colloquial English Without a `Whom' in Sight!" Find another book on which to spend $45.

Interesting and complete: a book on English Grammar for curious native speaker.

If you are a foreign learner it's definitely not the best.

This book is excellent. It is over my expectation. The explanation is clear and completed.

I recommend it all of students and who have interesting to study English.

I am a brazilian student. I prefer that book instead because it is more pedagogical:

Cambridge Grammar of English Paperback with CD ROM: A Comprehensive Guide (Cambridge Grammar of English)

It's a very good grammar.

But for the learners (as me), Oxford have better options.

The advantage: this is a single volume, instead of 3 on learners grammar.

Much less interactive than the learner's material. The only real negative point.

Good purchase.

I read this book as an English teacher in my annual *tour d'horizon* of the language I teach.

I discovered long ago, in learning formal grammar for computer science, that in general the relationship between any grammar and the language considered as "the set of valid sentences" (a precise set in computer language: an epistemologically fuzzy set in human language: but, a set) is many to one.

This is a fascinating concept because it dissolves as in a spell, as in an haruspication, as in a charm, the gibbering ghosts of graveyard grammar who insist that concepts such as "gerund" are only known if you use the word "gerund", and that furthermore the structures that they've imposed are the only possible structures.

Generations of urchins have been belabored by the false science of grammar, and it has created revolutions as in 1848.

Whereas there are several ways of parsing any given computer language, all of them "correct" depending on what you want to do; for example, in computer science, a-b-c has an obvious left to right parse which happens to generate the wrong answer on a typical "stack machine" as does a/b/c.

Which means that your students don't have to know about the "gerund" considered as a label, but they should know what happens when a verb is suffixed with ing. I call a "gerund" the "ing word".

This bridges the gap between traditional grammar, which despite all its apparent proto-scientific precision is really only the exhausting and dispiriting autopsy of the contents of the mind of some long-dead grammarian, and modern styles of English teaching which avoid grammar as they would the Black Plague...and which thereby end up discriminating in favor of girls, who in many cultures and on the whole naturally read and write, while boys prefer many activities, from shooting off their mouths to setting off squibs to blowing Headmaster's study up with nitroglycerine, to reading and writing.

The girls absorb good habits from their Improving Books such as Pride and Prejudice (an excellent book that needs only Indians, pirates, and nitroglycerine to be tippy-top-ho). The boys produce sentences of which they are inordinately proud, in my experience, but cannot de-engage brain from mouth and engage hand to write, because, again in my experience, they have insufficient exposure to the written model. Swotting the boys with formal methods derived from grammar often calms them down: sentence diagrams and a systematic exploration of all possible indicative tenses as a forced march is useful.

"Right, *mes enfants*, march or die: now we shall examine what I call the pluperfect."

I don't really know if the authors of the Oxford English Grammar know this, but they instinctively as linguists, and most assuredly NOT as "language curmudgeons", those unpleasant latter-day journalists and other waterflies who patrol ideas while pretending to patrol usage, give a tour not only of Received but also alternative English, mentioning at least Black English and the English of the north of England as proper systems i' their oon rrright.

It is a fascinating thought to me that the features of argot, patois and other forms of "uneducated" English such as a smaller number of forms of the verb "to be" as in "I be chillin' widdat" would be praised were they design features of a computer language, and that in learning English inflections, we're learning a rather inefficient system of communication.

Which is why, I believe, the language teacher needs to be studiedly neutral in the presentation of English. Its dominance a historical accident, having mostly to do with the willingness of jolly tars, mad bishops, and disgraced Earls to sail merrily into foreign ports with guns blazing and later, the fact that the last man standing in 1945 was GI Joe.

The French teacher on the other hand might well be permitted to strut and fret given that France is not a world power because of historical accident and that by any aesthetic measure, French is more pleasant.

But I digress. I recommend this book NOT to the student, but to her Teacher, or if Teacher, you are on a budget, the cheaper but more terse "Oxford Reference Grammar".

[More terse? Oh dear. How could I use an uninflected one-syllable comparative? Is not the rule that we must use inflections with all words of one syllable?]

[I do so because the rule applies to older words which like old people retain old usage habits. "More small" is obviously incorrect because small is an old word whereas terse is more recent.]

[However, I get about only 33000 Google hits for "more terse", many of them computer science centric: I get 84000 for "terser".]

[But, *stare decisis* and I'm the Daddy, that's why. "Terser" **sounds wrong** because the inflections belong to an olde English.]

[Aaaargh and belabor me with a lexicon, else. American English comes according to my British mates from Western counties where the lads went to sea, boys, and let her [Kate, in the Tempest] go hang. That is why we be rhotic and why it is easy for Americans to talk like Pirates, belubber me with a marlinspike, holystone the lazarette, luff the chuffersail and burn me buttocks, else.]

[But: I digress.]