English Grammar: An Outline

English grammar: an outline English grammar: an outline RODNEY HUDDLESTON Department of English University of Queensland CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo, Delhi Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www. Cambridge. org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521311526 © Cambridge University Press 1988 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1988 Thirteenth printing 2005 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Huddleston, Rodney D. English Grammar. Bibliography Includes index. 1. English language — Grammar — 1950— I. Title PE1106.H76 1988 428.2 87-34124 ISBN 978-0-521-32311-6 hardback ISBN 978-0-521-31152-6 paperback Transferred to digital printing 2009 Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Information regarding prices, travel timetables and other factual information given in this work are correct at the time of first printing but Cambridge University Press does not guarantee the accuracy of such information thereafter. Contents Preface Symbols and notational conventions 1 Preliminaries 2 The parts of speech: a preliminary outline 3 Verbs 4 The structure of kernel clauses 5 Tense, aspect and modality 6 Nouns and noun phrases 7 Adjectives, determinatives and numerals 8 Adverbs and prepositions 9 Clause type page ix xi 1 22 37 49 69 84 108 120 129 10 Negation 11 The subordination of clauses 143 152 12 Thematic systems of the clause 173 13 Coordination 193 Further reading Index Vll 208 209 Preface This book is intended as an introductory text for courses in English grammar at tertiary level. It offers an outline account of the most important and central grammatical constructions and categories in English. I have assumed only minimal prior familiarity with the structure of English: all the grammatical terminology used is systematically explained. The analysis draws on the descriptive and theoretical advances made in modern linguistics, and for this reason the book could be used for an elementary course on English within a linguistics programme. It is, however, intended for a wider audience: for any course aiming to present a descriptive overview of the structure of English. Significant departures from traditional grammar in analysis or terminology are pointed out, normally in footnotes. One distinctive feature of the book is that it discusses the major grammatical categories at both a language-particular and a general level. The languageparticular account gives the distinctive grammatical properties of the various categories as they apply to English: it thus provides the criteria for determining whether some word is a noun, verb, adjective, adverb or whatever, whether some verb-form is a past participle, a past tense form, etc., whether some clause is declarative, interrogative, imperative, exclamative - and so on. Analysis at the general level is concerned with what is common to the categories across languages, thus providing criteria for the application of the same terms in the grammars of different languages. For this reason the book could also be u