A Communicative Grammar of English By Geoffrey Leech Jan Svartvik

Description

A Communicative Grammar in English is a new kind of grammar. In writing it, we have assumed that studying grammar, for the overseas student, makes most sense if one starts with the question ‘How can I use grammar to communicate?’. Thus the main part of the book is devoted to the USES of grammar, rather than to grammatical STRUCTURE.

The book is intended primarily for the fairly advanced student, for example, the first-year university student. If you are such a student you will have studied English grammar in one form or another already, but here we offer you a new perspective on the subject, which relates grammatical structure systematically to meanings, uses, and situations. In this way, we hope you will improve and extend the range of your communicative skills in the language. The book also supplies the essential information about grammatical forms and structures which you will need, and can therefore be used as a general reference book or sourcebook on English grammar.

Here we explain briefly different kinds or varieties of English, such as (informal English), (written English) and (American. English). We make extensive use of such labels in the other parts of the book, because it is important, for communi­cation, to know in what contexts a particular form of language will be used. Part One ends with a list of references to variety labels, which enables you to follow up on the range of grammatical constructions and uses associated with a given variety, such as (informal English).

Much of the book deals with spoken English, and effective communication in speech depends to a great extent on intonation. So in this part, we introduce the most important features of English intonation, together with the intonation symbols that are used in Part Three.