A Communicative Grammar of English

Geoffrey Leech, Jan Svartvik

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138836891
• eBook ISBN: 9781317869689
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Linguistica

A Communicative Grammar of English has long been established as a grammar innovative in approach, reliable in coverage, and clear in its explanations. This fully revised and redesigned third edition provides up-to-date and accessible help to teachers, advanced learners and undergraduate students of English. Part One looks at the way English grammar varies in different types of English, such as 'formal' and 'informal', 'spoken' and 'written'; Part Two focuses on the uses of grammar rather than on grammatical structure and Part Three provides a handy alphabetically arranged guide to English grammar. A new workbook, The Communicative Grammar of English Workbook also accompanies this edition.

PART ONE

A guide to the use of this book

Introduction

1 It is sometimes argued that grammar is not important in a communicative approach to language. However, we take the view that communicative competence rests on a set of composite skills, one of which is grammatical:

Communicative competence is composed minimally of grammatical competence, sociolinguistic competence, and communication strategies, or what we will refer to as strategic competence. There is no strong theoretical or empirical motivation for the view that grammatical competence is any more or less crucial to successful communication than is sociolinguistic competence or strategic competence. The primary goal of a communicative approach must be to facilitate the integration of these types of knowledge for the learner, an outcome that is not likely to result from overemphasis on one form of competence over the others throughout a second language programme. (Michael Canale and Merrill Swain, ‘Theoretical Bases of Communicative Approaches to Second Language Teaching and Testing’, Applied Linguistics 1: 27, 1980)

There are several reasons for emphasizing the communication aspects of learning English grammar as we do in this book. Here, let us consider four reasons.

A new angle

2 The type of student we have had in mind when writing this book is fairly advanced, for example a first-year student at a university or college of education. Often, such students already have grounding in the grammar of the language after several years of school English. Yet their proficiency in actually using the language may be disappointing. This, we believe, may be partly due to ‘grammar fatigue’.

The student may therefore benefit from looking at grammar from another angle, where grammatical structures are systematically related to meanings, uses and situations, as we attempt to do in Part Two: ‘Grammar in use’. In this way we expect students to improve and extend their range of competence and their use of communication strategies in the language. In Part Three, called ‘A-Z in English grammar’, the book also supplies essential information about grammatical forms and structures, and can therefore be used as a general reference book or source book on English grammar. There we give references to relevant parts of A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, a standard grammatical description of English, where the advanced student can find extra information on topics which cannot be fully covered in this book.

A better organization

3 The conventional way of presenting English grammar in terms of structure also has a certain drawback in itself. For example, in such a grammar, notions of time may be dealt with in as many as four different places: under the tense of the verb, under time adverbs, under prepositional phrases denoting time, and under temporal conjunctions and clauses. The student who is primarily interested in making use of the language rather than in learning about its structure (and this is true for the majority of foreign students) is not likely to find such an arrangement particularly helpful. In A Communicative Grammar of English, the central part deals with grammar in use, which makes it possible to bring similar notions, such as those involving time, together in one place.

Spoken English

4 An important element in the communicative approach is the student’s ability to use and understand the spoken language. This emphasis on speech is sometimes misunderstood, so that the communicative method is taken to imply focus on the spoken language. We do not share this view: ‘communication’ means communication in both speech and writing. Yet, since traditional grammar tends to concentrate on written language, we think it is important for a communicative grammar to describe and exemplify both types of language use. (On grammar in spoken and written English, see Sections 17–32.)

Corpus data

5 The examples given in grammars have often been made up by grammarians rather than taken from real language in actual use. A made-up example may well serve to illustrate a particular grammatical point, but it can appear stilted or ‘wooden’, distancing the learning of grammar from real live usage. This is no doubt one reason why grammar is often considered to be a less important part of language in the communicative approach. We take the view that the grammar of a language is indeed of central concern to students, since it describes what makes language tick – how it can carry the meanings we want to communicate. In this revised edition of our grammar we have illustrated grammatical statements with the help of hundreds of authentic examples from English language corpora, especially Longman Corpus Network. Corpora stored on computers provide access to many millions of words of spoken and written material in modern English. However, the corpus examples sometimes have to be simplified by the omission of distracting material. There can also be an advantage – for example, where precise contrasts have to be clearly indicated – in making use of made-up examples. We believe that in this book we have achieved the right balance between the use of authentic examples and the use of the clearest illustrative material.

The way this book is organized

6 The book is divided into three parts as follows:

• Part One: A guide to the use of this book (sections 1–56)

• Part Two: Grammar in use (sections 57–434)

• Part Three: A–Z in English grammar (sections 435–747)

Note that the book is organized in consecutively numbered sections (1–747), for ease of reference. At the end of the book, there is a detailed index which gives section numbers, rather than pages, as the most convenient means of lo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• Symbols
• Part One: A guide to the use of this book
• Part Two: Grammar in use
• Part Three: A–Z in English grammar
• Index