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 language-particular 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.