Table Of ContentAdvanced
English Grammar
Also available from Bloomsbury
A Critical Introduction to Phonology, by Daniel Silverman
Cognitive Grammar in Stylistics, by Marcello Giovanelli and Chloe
Harrison
Reflective Language Teaching, by Thomas S. C. Farrell
Research Methods in Linguistics, edited by Lia Litosseliti
Second Language Acquisition in Action, by Andrea Nava and Luciana
Pedrazzini
Advanced
English Grammar
A Linguistic Approach
Ilse Depraetere and
Chad Langford
Second Edition
BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK
1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA
BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are
trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
First edition published 2012
This second edition published 2020
Copyright © Ilse Depraetere and Chad Langford, 2020
Ilse Depraetere and Chad Langford have asserted their right under the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work.
For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. viii constitute an extension
of this copyright page.
Cover image: © Shutterstock
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission
in writing from the publishers.
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for,
any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this
book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any
inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but
can accept no responsibility for any such changes.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-6989-3
PB: 978-1-3500-6987-9
ePDF: 978-1-3500-6991-6
eBook: 978-1-3500-6990-9
Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.
A Companion Website for this book is available at:
www.bloomsbury.com/advanced-english-grammar- 9781350069879
To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com
and sign up for our newsletters.
Contents
Introduction to Second Edition vi
Introduction to First Edition and Acknowledgements viii
List of Abbreviations and Symbols xi
1
Getting started: Forms and functions 1
2
The verb and its complements 31
3
The noun and the noun phrase 105
4
Aspect and tense 175
5
Modals and modality 255
6
Discourse 315
List of sources of examples 340
Appendix: Irregular verbs 344
Bibliography 356
Lexical index 359
Subject index 368
Introduction to
Second Edition
Although the core of the first edition of this book remains in this second edi-
tion, especially in terms of approach and goals, readers familiar with our take
on English grammar will recognize some changes. These essentially concern
the fine-tuning of some of the descriptions and explanations on the basis of
our experience teaching with the book, observations from readers – students
and colleagues alike –, insights gained from research on various topics and the
input from three reviewers on the first edition. We have also updated a num-
ber of examples. A few additional concepts have been included, exercises have
been revised and a number of new exercises have been added. An important
addition is an online glossary with an overview of the most important concepts
introduced in the grammar. The glossary is available at www.bloomsbury.com/
advanced-english-grammar-9781350069879. We are grateful to Joshua Albair
for his invaluable help with the organization of the glossary and to Benoît
Leclercq, who helped shape the entries relating to Chapter 1.
An additional set of exercises from the University of Lille’s EGAD (English
Grammar at a Distance) project, co-authored with Benoît Leclercq, is available
at the following address: http://klip.univ-lille.fr/fiche/74-egad- entrainement-
a-la-grammaire-anglaise-a-distance. EGAD includes exercises aimed at
learners of various levels, from more remedial drills to more challenging
exercises comparable to the ones in this book. Though not a companion
compendium per se, EGAD is very much informed by the approach we take
here and provides additional practice to learners from a wide variety of back-
grounds.
We are very grateful to all the people who have written to us and who have
shared their views on points addressed in the grammar, be they our current or
former colleagues at the University of Lille or users of the book. We are grate-
ful to the editorial board of Bloomsbury for their genuine encouragement as
we updated the grammar. We would also like to thank the University of Lille
vii
Introduction to Second Edition
for their support, which enabled the design of EGAD. Finally, we would like
to thank our anonymous reviewers for the invaluable input they provided.
We hope that this new edition will continue to unravel in the minds of our
readers the intricacies of English grammar and that it will spark in them the
same sense of excitement we have for English and for language in general.
Ilse Depraetere ([email protected])
Chad Langford ([email protected])
Villeneuve d’Ascq, December 2018
Introduction to
First Edition and
Acknowledgements
We came to the decision to write this book after our seventh year of teaching
English grammar together at the University of Lille. Having used a number of
course books, each of them very good in its own right, we had come to real-
ize that none of them really corresponded to the way we wanted to approach
grammar with our students. On the one hand, we wanted to step up our
discussion of certain areas of grammar in ways that the more student- oriented
manuals did not enable us to do optimally; on the other hand, the more lin-
guistically oriented grammars were overwhelming in their completeness,
leaving students with little idea as to what was and was not essential in their
quest to learn English. What we needed was something in the middle, a com-
promise between our students’ concrete needs and our desire to demonstrate
to them that there is a logical system underlying the rules they were learning
by rote memorization.
Our students study in different degree programmes, and not all of them
specialize in linguistics. And yet we were convinced that an approach that
made use of basic linguistic concepts could be beneficial to the description
of the fundamentals of English grammar regardless of the specific study pro-
gramme that students were enrolled in and would consequently have the effect
of improving their spoken and written skills. We were driven by the belief that
the teaching of grammar to non-native university language students can – and
should – be made challenging and exciting by moving beyond an overview of
seemingly unconnected rules and fairly repetitive, traditional exercises. Our
experience using various experimental versions of this book in the classroom
over the past few years has only strengthened this conviction.
We have done our utmost to make the link between theory and practice
explicit. Our goal is usefulness rather than comprehensiveness: indeed, the
aims of our book necessitated a selection in the topics to be addressed and a
certain amount of simplification. The definitions of the concepts we introduce
ix
Introduction to First Edition and Acknowledgements
are accessible to students with no background in linguistics and are conceived
in such a way as to benefit foreign language learning. We have also included a
set of challenging exercises, many of which require students to back up their
answers with some basic justification. A full key to all of these exercises as
well as a set of additional exercises can be found at www.bloomsbury.com/
advanced-english-grammar-9781350069879. In short, we believe that any
upper-intermediate or advanced learner of English can be counted among the
target group of this grammar, be they enrolled in an English language pro-
gramme, a programme in English linguistics or a teacher training programme.
Native speakers looking for some insight to how their language functions may
find the book useful, too, as will anyone interested in learning more about
some of the ins and outs of how English grammar works.
A quick glance at the book will show that we make ample use of illustrative
examples. This is not a corpus-based grammar, and examples are primarily
our own; we do however occasionally use authentic examples (primarily from
the British and American press), often simply to give some variation to the
voice behind the examples, but also when we feel that an authentic example
illustrated our point particularly well. In those instances where an example
gleaned from the internet is no longer retrievable, we have simply indicated
the source as ‘www’.
We have been inspired – at times no doubt unconsciously – by the reference
and pedagogical grammars we studied ourselves when we were students or
that we have used with our students throughout the years. We have mentioned
in the bibliography those grammars to which we are most indebted. Some
of the insights in the aspect and tense chapter were inspired by Reichenbach
(1947), Vendler (1967) and the theory of tense developed by Declerck (1991a).
We have also included a list of references to articles and monographs which
have directly or indirectly shaped our views on the issues we address.
Several colleagues have helped us to strike a proper balance between
linguistic underpinnings and pedagogical aims; we are grateful to those col-
leagues-friends-experts who have commented on one or several chapters.
Bas Aarts, Joost Buysschaert, Ruth Huart, Gunther Kaltenböck, Paul Larreya,
Philip Miller, Kathleen O’Connor, Susan Reed, Raf Salkie and Christopher
Williams all provided valuable feedback. Interaction with Renaat Declerck
and Samuel N. Rosenberg over many years has been the source of stimulating
discussion, the impact of which goes beyond what can be observed in this
grammar. Their influence is nonetheless present here. We would also like to
thank the colleagues teaching first- and second-year grammar at the Uni-
versity of Lille who tested chapters with their students and provided useful
