Analyzing the Grammar of English offers a descriptive analysis of the indispensable elements of English grammar. Designed to be covered in one semester, this textbook starts from scratch and takes nothing for granted beyond a reading and speaking knowledge of English. Extensively revised to function better in skills-building classes, it includes more interspersed exercises that promptly test what is taught, simplified and clarified explanations, greatly expanded and more diverse activities, and a new glossary of over 200 technical terms.
Analyzing the Grammar of English is the only English grammar to view the sentence as a strictly punctuational construct—anything that begins with a capital letter and ends with a period, a question mark, an exclamation mark, or three dots—rather than a syntactic one, and to load, in consequence, all the necessary syntactic analysis onto the clause and its constituents.
It is also one of the very few English grammars to include—alongside multiple examples of canonical or "standard" language—occasional samples of stigmatized speech to illustrate grammar points.
Students and teachers in courses of English grammatical analysis, English teaching methods, TESOL methods, and developmental English will all benefit from this new edition.
Table of Contents
Introduction
1. Utterances, Sentences, Clauses, and Phrases
The Most Important Parts of Speech
Sounds: Phones, Phonemes, and Allophones
Forms: Morphemes and Allomorphs
/z/—A Highly Productive English Morpheme
/d/—Another Highly Productive English Morpheme
Problems with /d/
Note
2. Verbs, Tenses, Forms, and Functions
Conjugating a Verb
The Nine Morphological Patterns of Irregular Verbs
Verb Tenses and Auxiliary Verbs: The Nonmodal Auxiliaries (Do, Be, Have) and the Modal Auxiliaries
The Compound Tenses: Future and Conditional
Verb Tenses' Meanings and Uses
Notes
3. Basic Structures, Questions, Do-Insertion, Negation, Auxiliaries, Responses, Emphasis, Contraction
The Five Basic Structures
Two Different Types of Questions
The Role of the First Auxiliary (aux)
Nonmodal Auxiliaries Be/Do/Have Can also Be Used as Lexical Verbs
Wh-Words as Subjects vs. Wh-Words as Objects
Selection Questions
Declarative Questions
Echo Questions
Tag Questions
Invariant Tags
Elliptical Responses
Emphasis and Emphatic Structures
Contractions: A Summing Up
Note
4. Modals, Prepositional and Particle Verbs, Transitivity and Voice, and Conditionality
Modals and Perimodals
Two-Word Verbs: Prepositional Verbs vs. Particle Verbs
Transitivity: Active Voice, Passive Voice
Intransitive Verbs and "Voice"
Real-World Use of the English Passive: Pragmatic Constraints and Agent-Phrase Addition GET Passives
Conditionality
5. Some Components of the Noun Phrase: Forms and Functions
Person and Number
Gender
Case
Expressing Possession: Genitives and Partitives
Partitive-Genitive Constructions
Determiners, Common/Proper Nouns, and Mass/Count Nouns
Mass Nouns and Count Nouns
Mass-to-Count Shifts
Dual-Function Nouns: Nouns That Are Both Mass and Count
Pronouns
Pro-Words: Pronoun-Like Words for Clauses, Phrases, Adjectives, and Adverbs
Note
6. Adjectives and Relative Clauses
Attributive and Predicate Adjectives: Identification and Syntax
The Syntax of Prenominal Attributive Adjectives
Adjectives and Adverbs: The Comparative and Superlative Forms
Relative Clauses, Relative Pronouns, and Their Antecedents
When to Use Who and When to Use Whom
Deleting Relative Pronouns: Creating Gaps and the Process of Gapping
The Twenty Types of Relative Clauses
Restrictive and Nonrestrictive (Relative) Clauses
Relative Pronoun Clauses with Present Participles/Gerunds and with Past Participles
Notes
7. Adverbs, It and There Referentials and Non-Referentials, and Fronting
Adverbs
It as a Referential, It as a Nonreferential
Adverb Referential There, Existence-Marking Nonreferential There
Emphasis by Peak Stressing, Solo Fronting, or Cleft Fronting
Note
8. Compound Sentences: Coordination, Subordination
Compound Sentences
Coordinate Sentences
Subordinate Sentences
Tenseless Complements
The That-Clause
The Infinitive Complement
Infinitive Complement with Equi-Deletion
Infinitive Complement with Raising to Object
Gerund Complement
Purpose Complements
Miscellaneous Complementation Patterns
Summary of All Clausal Complementation Patterns
Appendix
Glossary of Terms
Index
Reviews
"Teschner and Evans provide a text that is simply and clearly explained while at the same time presenting the full complexity of the essential structures of English. Students find the exercises useful, challenging, and even entertaining."—Rebecca Babcock, assistant professor of literature and language, University of Texas of the Permian Basin
Awards
2008 Typographical Text Award, Large Nonprofit Publishers Category of the Washington Publishers Book Design and Effectiveness Awards, Third Place
About the Author
Richard V. Teschner is a professor of languages and linguistics at the University of Texas-El Paso. He is coauthor (with M. Stanley Whitley) of the textbook Pronouncing English: A Stress-Based Approach with CD-ROM.
Eston E. Evans is professor emeritus of ESL and German at Tennessee Tech University.
