Nouns head nominals, which head noun phrases (NPs). The most common NP functions are subject, object, and predicative complement. Nouns mostly inflect for number: singular or plural. Pronouns are a special subset of nouns which also inflect for case. A nominal includes a head noun and any internal dependents. Unlike most phrases, nominals can have adjective-phrase modifiers, and NPs uniquely may have a constituent in determiner function.

Though it’s true that only nouns denote ‘people, places, and things’, they denote almost anything, including actions. Along with number, the semantic notion of definiteness and the count/non-count distinction affect the choice of determiner. Subject-verb agreement is also affected, for example, with measure expressions. Determiners are usually determinative phrases or genitive NPs. Nominals allow complements, usually preposition phrases. NPs also have a range of external dependents, including predeterminer modifiers. Determiners and modifiers may function as fused heads, in which case, the NP may not actually include a noun. The pronouns, including personal, relative, and interrogative types, have deictic and anaphoric uses and notably have gender.

This book explores how English sentences are constructed. In this introduction, we explain our approach. We describe the current status of English as a global language, why it holds this status, and why it might not be the best choice. We characterize Standard English as a large dialect cluster, mentioning the British and American subvarieties, along with other dialects, while deploring dialect prejudice. Differences between spoken & written English, formal & informal style, and the grammarian’s purposes of describing & advising are addressed.

In the book, we introduce and define many technical terms for grammatical concepts, and here we justify some of our terminological decisions, noting that even familiar terms like noun and verb will be clearly defined, though often in ways new to the reader. We provide examples to show why.

Though many think language is about words, we focus on sentences and the discoverable constraints about how English sentences can and can’t be structured, constraints that every English speaker recognizes. The most interesting thing about grammar is that these constraints aren’t stipulated rules. They can be discovered through investigation.

Comparison involves morphology and syntax for describing something as ranking above or below something else, as being equivalent to something, or as falling at the very top or the very bottom of the scale. Many adjectives do this by inflecting for grade, having plain, comparative and superlative forms. This inflectional system applies also to a small number of determinatives and adverbs. Others are modified by ‘more’ or ‘less’.

Superlatives express set comparison, with one item outranking all of the others. The comparative form, by contrast, is predominantly used in term comparison – comparison between a primary term and a secondary term. There are also comparisons of equality, which are always marked by a modifying phrase rather than by inflection, along with a type of non-scalar comparison where the issue is simply of identity or similarity.

The prepositions ‘than’ and ‘as’ often license as complements a distinctive type of subordinate clause called a comparative clause. Comparative clauses constitute one of the three major kinds of tensed subordinate clause, being distinctive in that they are obligatorily reduced in certain ways relative to the structure of main clauses.

Although adjectives typically denote properties, that’s not definitive. The distinctive properties of prototypical adjectives are gradability inflection for comparative and superlative. Adjective phrases (AdjPs) function as predicative complements and modifiers in nominals, though some specialize in one of these. AdjPs take adverbs, notably ‘very’, as modifiers. These properties generally distinguish them from nouns and verbs which can be useful in fused modifier-heads or with overlap, as in ‘it’s flat’ vs ‘I have a flat’. AdjPs differ from DPs in always being omissible from an NP, while a DP in determiner function is often required. Also DPs, but not AdjP can occur in as a fused head in a partitive construction. AdjPs also occur as supplements, here differing from PPs in that AdjPs typically have a predicand that is the subject of the main clause. Like most other phrases, AdjPs allow complements, usually PPs or subordinate clauses.

The adverb category is the most heterogenous in the properties of its members. Many adverbs are formed from adjectives using the ‘⋅ly’ suffix, but AdvPs don’t function as attributive modifiers in nominals and rarely function as or allow complements.

A relative clause is a subordinate clause with an anaphoric relationship to a matrix clause. Often a missing phrase determines the anaphoric relationship. The part of a modifying relative clause that is anaphorically linked to the head noun is called the relativized element. It is overt in ‘wh’ relatives, but in non‘-wh’ relatives it amounts simply to an absence – a location in the clause where there could have been some phrase but it’s missing. In ‘wh’ relatives, the relativized element is the relative phrase or is part of a larger relative phrase. The relative phrase is fronted if it is not the subject. Non-‘wh’ relatives start with subordinator ‘that’ or are bare. In traditional accounts, ‘that’ is wrongly called a relative pronoun.

Most relative clause function as modifiers in a nominal within an NP. We call these integrated. Other relative clauses can function as supplements, which are much more loosely attached.

Some relative constructions are NPs, not clauses. These are the fused relatives, in which the antecedent and the relativized element are fused together instead of being expressed separately. Finally, we mentioned relative clauses in the cleft construction.

Information structure concerns the relationship between sentence properties and the surrounding discourse: the acceptability of the sentences involved can depend on what has been established by the immediately preceding sentences in the text or conversation. The non-canonical constructions described are passive clauses, extraposition, the existential construction, the ‘it’-cleft construction, pseudo-clefts, dislocation, pre- and post-posing, and reduction. These information-packaging constructions generally have a counterpart which is syntactically more elementary or basic, and although they typically have the same core (logical) meaning as their basic counterpart, they package and present the information of the sentence differently. Our major concern in this chapter will be to describe the syntactic differences between these constructions and their basic counterparts and to investigate the factors which favour or disfavour the use of one of these constructions rather than the more basic counterpart.

Non-finite clauses are always subordinate, don’t show primary tense or agreement information, often lack a subject, and often refer to a possible situation rather than an actualized one. There are five kinds: ‘to’-infinitival & bare infinitival with a plain-form verb; gerund-participial with a gerund-participle verb; past-participial with a past-participle verb; and verbless clauses. The subordinators ‘for’ and ‘to’ in infinitival clauses mark subjects and head VPs respectively.

A pronoun subject in a non-finite clause may be in genitive or accusative case. If a clause has no subject, a predicand can often be determined syntactically by looking at a linguistic antecedent, often the subject of the main clause. In other cases, it must be inferred, either from something in the discourse or as a participant in the speech act. Hollow non-finite clauses lack both a subject and a non-subject NP, the semantic content of which is recoverable from an antecedent.

Some verbs taking infinitival complements are transparent. The syntactic subject of such a verb is the predicand of its clausal complement but not of the matrix clause. The subject is said to be raised. There are also raised objects.

Verbs combine with other words to form verb phrases (VP), which are the heads of most clauses. A typical clause is a subject and a head VP. English verbs typically have more variety in their forms than other English words, reflecting grammatical categories like tense, person, and number, though these forms can sometimes look and sound the same. Most also have the secondary forms, namely gerund-participle, past participle, and plain form. A special group of verbs with distinctive properties is the auxiliary verbs, including the modal auxiliaries.

Semantically speaking, situations such as actions and states have perfective and imperfective interpretations, which are expressed in clauses and depend largely on the head verb, along with its tense and aspect. English has two past tenses (preterite & perfect), one present tense, and no future tense. The preterite and present are the primary tenses. There are two aspects, progressive and non-progressive. The modal auxiliaries specialize in expressing modality, which relates to how the possible situations described in a clause can reflect reality. There’s also a special irrealis form of be for expressing counterfactuals.

Here, we look at a number of syntactic differences that are used for different pragmatic purposes, specifically the characteristic but imperfect relations between the following clause types and speech acts: declarative clauses for making statements, closed interrogative clauses for asking closed questions, open interrogative clauses for asking open questions, imperative clauses for issuing commands, and exclamative clauses for uttering exclamations. These relations exist for both main and subordinate clauses.

Declarative clauses are the basic clause type that we’ve been describing so far. Interrogatives have a number of characteristics differences, including subject–auxiliary inversion and the use of interrogative words and fronting of the interrogative phrase in open interrogatives. The exclamatives are always marked by an initial exclamative phrase that begins with either adjective ‘what’ or adverb ‘how’. Imperatives characteristically lack a subject and use the plain form of the verb. We conclude with a brief description of a few minor clause types.

Prepositions typically denote relations in space or time, but this is not definitive. Our analysis of prepositions diverges significantly from the traditional view. Where that requires PPs to have NP objects, we allow a much fuller range of complements, including content clauses and no complement, making many traditional ‘subordinating conjunctions’ and adverbs prepositions. Prepositions rarely have inflected forms. They can usually be modified by AdvPs, notably ‘right’ and ‘straight’.

PPs commonly function as complements and adjuncts. They may function predicative complements, but rarely in ‘become’ VPs. As adjuncts, PPs don’t require a predicand. A number of prepositions have grammaticized uses, such as ‘by’ in passive clauses. Many prepositions can be stranded or fronted, a choice affected by various syntactic factors. Some unusual prepositions, such as ‘ago’, must follow a measure expression.

Certain verbs license particles, dependents that may appear between a verb and its object, an unusual situation, usually a PP. Many verb + preposition combinations have idiomatic meanings, but we reject the ‘phrasal verb’ analysis because the combinations are not phrases.

Unlike other constructions, coordinations are headless, consisting of two or more strings in coordinate function, often phrases of the same category and typically linked by means of a coordinator in marker function (mainly ‘and’, ‘or’, and ‘but’). The marker is a dependent in an expanded coordinate. Those without a marker are bare coordinates.

A coordination is permitted roughly wherever all of its coordinates, unlimited in number, would be permitted. Coordinates are required to be syntactically similar in potential function.

The order of coordinates is not always free. When the order of a pair of coordinates may be switched, they are symmetric. Otherwise, they’re asymmetric. An expanded coordinate can never be preposed. Sometimes semantic considerations require a particular order, and some coordinates are fixed phrases. The interpretation of a coordination may be joint or distributive.When a coordinate itself is a coordination, the coordinations are said to be layered. Finally, we note a number of Non-basic cases: expansion of coordinates by adjuncts, gapped coordination, coordination of non-constituents, delayed right constituent coordination, and end-attached coordinates.

The clause is a special kind of phrase with a verb phrase (VP) as its head, also called its predicate. The subject is an external complement (outside the VP). Though traditional definitions of the subject fail, subjects have some characteristic properties. Notably, they usually precede the VP, but some interrogative constructions feature subject-auxiliary inversion, in which the subject is preceded by an auxiliary verb; subject pronouns are usually nominative case. Semantically, subjects are typically the predicand, a semantic term for what a predicate applies to. Objects are internal complements, and pronoun objects are usually accusative case. Some verbs license two objects: direct and indirect. The verb ‘be’ and a few others take predicative complements. Like objects, predicative complements are internal complements. Unlike objects, they can be adjective phrases and they never correspond to any passive subject. There are ascriptive and specifying uses of ‘be’. Internal complements also include various subordinate-clause and preposition-phrase complements.

Negation is marked by individual words (such as ‘not’, ‘no’, ‘never’) in a variety of functions (including adjunct, determiner, and head of VP) or by affixes within a word (the suffix ‘·n’t’ or prefixes like ‘un·’ or ‘non·’). Very often there is an effect on the whole clause, and negation is usefully divided into clausal and subclausal negation. There are a number of syntactic tests for clausal negation, including the ‘not even’ test and confirmation tags. Within clausal negation a further distinction exists between verb and non-verb negation.

The grammatical system in which positive and negative contrast is called polarity, and it can be absolute (e.g., ‘no’ & ‘never’) – or approximate (e.g., ‘few’ & ‘rarely’). A number of words or larger expressions have the property of being polarity-sensitive, in the sense that they occur readily in clauses of one polarity but not of the other. Some of these occur equally well in negative and interrogative clauses. We call these non-affirmative items.

The scope of negation is the part of the sentence that the negative applies to semantically.

If you’re coming to this book from a traditional grammar or with little or no background in grammar, or if you plan to read only individual chapters, then this chapter was written to orient you to our approach and make your life easier.

We start by discussing words, different senses of what a word is, and the ways that words are categorized. Then show how words can be combined into phrases with heads and dependents, where each phrase category is named after the category of its head word. These phrases build into a special larger phrase called a clause.

With this framework in hand, we move into the core of the chapter. Beginning with §2.3, each of the sections corresponds with a chapter. So, Ch. 3 and §2.3 are Verbs and verb phrases, Ch. 4 and §2.4 are Complements in clauses, etc.

The chapter also includes an appendix explaining the book’s notational conventions.

The Afro-Hispanic languages of the Americas (AHLAs) are rich in structures and prosodic patterns that would be considered either ungrammatical or pragmatically infelicitous in standard Spanish. Some of these features have traditionally been classified as the traces of a once-existing creole language, which would have almost completely dissolved after a process of decreolization. The present book was written out of the conviction that the Decreolization Hypothesis is on the wrong track and that such “creole-like” features can actually be explained as the result of common contact-driven phenomena, which are related to processing constraints affecting the interfaces between different language modules; hence, they are universal and depend on the nature of the architecture of the language faculty.