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3
УДК 802.0
ББК 81.2 Англ
Б 70
Рецензент:
кафедра грамматики и истории английского языка Московского государственного
лингвистического университета (зав. кафедрой проф. Т.С. Сорокина)
ISBN 5-06-003669-3 © ГУП издательство «Высшая школа», 2000
Оригинал-макет данного издания является собственностью издательства «Высшая школа» и его
репродуцирование (воспроизведение) любым способом без согласия издательства запрещается.
FOREWORD
The present theoretical outline of English grammar, 3rd edition, is intended as a manual for the departments
of English in universities and teacher training colleges. Its purpose is to introduce the students into the problems
of up-to-date grammatical study of English on a systemic basis, sustained by demonstrations of applying
modern analytical techniques to various grammatical phenomena of living English speech.
The given description of the grammatical structure of English, naturally, is not to be regarded as exhaustive
in any point of detail. The author's immediate aims were to supply the students with such information as will
enable them to form judgements of their own on questions of diverse grammatical intricacies (the practical
mastery of the elements of English grammar is supposed to have been gained by the students at the earlier
stages of tuition); to bring forth in the students a steady habit of trying to see into the deeper implications
underlying the outward appearances of lingual correlations bearing on grammar; to teach them to independently
improve their linguistic qualifications through reading and critically appraising the available works on
grammatical language study; to foster their competence in facing academic controversies concerning problems
of grammar.
The emphasis laid on cultivating an active element in the student's approach to language and its grammar
explains why the book gives prominence both to the technicalities of grammatical observations and to the
general methodology of linguistic knowledge: the due application of the latter will lend the necessary
demonstrative force to any serious consideration of the many special points of grammatical analysis. In this
connection, the author has tried, throughout the whole of the book, to point out the progressive character of the
development of modern grammatical theory. Indeed, one is to clearly understand that in the course of disputes
and continued research in manifold particular fields, the grammatical section of the science of language arrives
at an ever more adequate presentation of the structure of language in its integral description.
This kind of outlining the foundations of the discipline in question is especially important at the present
stage of the developing linguistic knowledge — the knowledge which has found itself in the midst of the radical
advance of science characteristic of the last decades of the XX century.
In preparing the third edition of the book the author has been guided by the experience gained from its
academic use since the first publication in 1983 and second publication in 1994. During this time a number of
new ideas have been put forward both in general and English linguistics that should be presented to the
students. It especially concerns the theory of units of language and levels of language and the linguistic study of
continual text. The main additions and revisions made by the author mostly deal with these important fields of
description.
Materials illustrating the analysed elements of English grammar have been mostly collected from the literary
works of British and American authors. Some of the cited examples have been subjected to slight alterations
aimed at giving the necessary prominence to the lingual phenomena under study. Source references for limited
stretches of text are not supplied except in cases of special relevance (such as implications of individual style or
involvement in contextual background).