Includes bibliographical references (p. 1765-1778) and indexes.

Preliminaries / Geoffrey K. Pullum and Rodney Huddleston -- Syntactic overview ; The verb ; The clause : complements / Rodney Huddleston -- Nouns and noun phrases / John Payne and Robert Huddleston -- Adjectives and adverbs ; Prepositions and preposition phrases / Geoffrey K. Pullum and Rodney Huddleston -- The clause : adjuncts / Anita Mittwoch, Rodney Huddleston, and Peter Collins -- Negation / Geoffrey K. Pullum and Rodney Huddleston -- Clause type and illocutionary force ; Content clauses and reported speech / Rodney Huddleston -- Relative constructions and unbounded dependencies / Rodney Huddleston, Geoffrey K. Pullum, and Peter Peterson -- Comparative constructions ; Non-finite and verbless clauses / Rodney Huddleston -- Coordination and supplementation / Rodney Huddleston, John Payne, and Peter Peterson -- Information packaging / Gregory Ward, Betty Birner, and Rodney Huddleston -- Deixis and anaphora / Lesley Stirling and Rodney Huddleston -- Inflectional morphology and related matters / Frank Palmer, Rodney Huddleston, and Geoffrey K. Pullum -- Lexical word-formation / Laurie Bauer and Rodney Huddleston -- Punctuation / Geoffrey Nunberg, Ted Briscoe, and Rodney Huddleston.

Publisher description: This book presents a new and comprehensive descriptive grammar of English, written by the principal authors in collaboration with an international research team of a dozen linguists in five countries. It represents a major advance over previous grammars by virtue of drawing systematically on the linguistic research carried out on English during the last forty years. It incorporates insights from the theoretical literature but presents them in a way that is accessible to readers without formal training in linguistics. It is based on a sounder and more consistent descriptive framework than previous large-scale grammars, and includes much more explanation of grammatical terms and concepts, together with justification for the ways in which the analysis differs from traditional grammar. The book contains twenty chapters and a guide to further reading. Its usefulness is enhanced by diagrams of sentence structure, cross-references between sections, a comprehensive index, and user-friendly design and typography throughout.