Hi all!
I want to get a comprehensive grammar book that covers English language in depth.
Someone suggested getting The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language
by Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey Pullum
Can someone give me comment on this book? Or is there any better suggestion?
Thanks in advance!
Suggestions on getting a Enlish grammar book
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fluffyhamster
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No doubt about it, H&P's CGEL is a great book (stonking tome, in fact!) that provides more details than just about any other current grammar available, BUT if you don't know very much about grammar generally (i.e. haven't become too dissatisfied with "lesser" books yet - like the CGEL could be the Holy Grail of grammar books!), or aren't very creative when it comes to using indexes (e.g. approaching a grammar problem lexically rather than terminologically-exactingly, you could look up several lexemes likely to appear in a certain grammatical construction), it could be quite a daunting book to use.
And even if you are already pretty au fait with grammar, I really would recommend that you buy Huddleston & Pullum's A Student's Introduction to English Grammar IN ADDITION TO the(ir) CGEL, and read that BEFORE even attempting to "read" and "learn" much from the CGEL; the Student's Intro will help ensure you gain a good idea of the broad framework and certainly the general terminology (whatever different ~) the authors prefer, after which you should be able to use the CGEL efficiently as a genuine resource (rather than having to pore over its opening chapter, and then the next, and the next...as if you might miss something essential that would make using the tome a bit easier). Or you could at least read Huddleston's 'A short overview of English syntax based on the CGEL' (but bear in mind that Huddleston without Pullum as a co-author is a harder read...which is a way of warning you off of Huddleston's sole-authored books (even though there is obviously some stuff of value in 'em)):
http://ling.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/grammar/index.html
> http://ling.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/grammar/otherstuff.html
Then, there are "student" grammars (e.g. the 'University Grammar') based on Quirk et al's CGEL (1985) more general/traditional, somewhat less theoretical(ly "respectable", speaking in generative grammar-influenced terms) that seem to have benefitted some in their transition to the full-size grammars like H&P's CGEL (or indeed the Quirk et al), but if you're already seriously thinking of buying the H&P CGEL then as mentioned above their Student's Intro would doubtless be the better lead-in and entry.
Anyway, if you do a search for 'CGEL' here on Dave's and then (from the 22 or so results) look at the penultimate post of the 'person responsible' thread; the last post and link from the 'Function of rising tag (question)s' thread; and perhaps Stephen Jones' post in the 'are these conditional sentences?' thread, you will be able to get some idea of the comparative depth that H&P's CGEL goes into in these 3 areas at least.
You might also notice that there's a 'Recommendations: A Comprehensive Grammar…v. Cambridge Gram' thread, but I think that I would actually nowadays recommend the H&P CGEL above at least the LGSWE (Biber et al 1999: http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/J/J01/J01-1006.pdf ; "versus" http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/language ... 00122.html ); that's not to say however that the aforementioned Quirk et al CGEL of 1985 can't still give the H&P CGEL a run for its money: http://linguistlist.org/issues/13/13-1853.html
Oh, and one good final reason to buy the H&P CGEL is that it seems to have become the standard descriptive framework used by the team of Language Log linguists.
I should close by saying however that H&P's CGEL is expensive and could even become quite the "white elephant" compared to any half-dozen or so cheaper books (giving you at least introductory access to a potential range of theoretical frameworks, some of which might be more suited to ELT generally) that you could get with the same sum of money - see for example that long list of books in my reply (and the links leading from it) on your earlier Elementary Education forum thread, David!
And even if you are already pretty au fait with grammar, I really would recommend that you buy Huddleston & Pullum's A Student's Introduction to English Grammar IN ADDITION TO the(ir) CGEL, and read that BEFORE even attempting to "read" and "learn" much from the CGEL; the Student's Intro will help ensure you gain a good idea of the broad framework and certainly the general terminology (whatever different ~) the authors prefer, after which you should be able to use the CGEL efficiently as a genuine resource (rather than having to pore over its opening chapter, and then the next, and the next...as if you might miss something essential that would make using the tome a bit easier). Or you could at least read Huddleston's 'A short overview of English syntax based on the CGEL' (but bear in mind that Huddleston without Pullum as a co-author is a harder read...which is a way of warning you off of Huddleston's sole-authored books (even though there is obviously some stuff of value in 'em)):
http://ling.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/grammar/index.html
> http://ling.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/grammar/otherstuff.html
Then, there are "student" grammars (e.g. the 'University Grammar') based on Quirk et al's CGEL (1985) more general/traditional, somewhat less theoretical(ly "respectable", speaking in generative grammar-influenced terms) that seem to have benefitted some in their transition to the full-size grammars like H&P's CGEL (or indeed the Quirk et al), but if you're already seriously thinking of buying the H&P CGEL then as mentioned above their Student's Intro would doubtless be the better lead-in and entry.
Anyway, if you do a search for 'CGEL' here on Dave's and then (from the 22 or so results) look at the penultimate post of the 'person responsible' thread; the last post and link from the 'Function of rising tag (question)s' thread; and perhaps Stephen Jones' post in the 'are these conditional sentences?' thread, you will be able to get some idea of the comparative depth that H&P's CGEL goes into in these 3 areas at least.
You might also notice that there's a 'Recommendations: A Comprehensive Grammar…v. Cambridge Gram' thread, but I think that I would actually nowadays recommend the H&P CGEL above at least the LGSWE (Biber et al 1999: http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/J/J01/J01-1006.pdf ; "versus" http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/language ... 00122.html ); that's not to say however that the aforementioned Quirk et al CGEL of 1985 can't still give the H&P CGEL a run for its money: http://linguistlist.org/issues/13/13-1853.html
Oh, and one good final reason to buy the H&P CGEL is that it seems to have become the standard descriptive framework used by the team of Language Log linguists.
I should close by saying however that H&P's CGEL is expensive and could even become quite the "white elephant" compared to any half-dozen or so cheaper books (giving you at least introductory access to a potential range of theoretical frameworks, some of which might be more suited to ELT generally) that you could get with the same sum of money - see for example that long list of books in my reply (and the links leading from it) on your earlier Elementary Education forum thread, David!