CHAPTER 9

A Grammar of English

9.1 Caveat

A definitive grammar of English does not exist. For a reasonably complete grammar from an authoritative source the reader is referred to A Grammar of Contemporary English by Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech and Svartvik (Longmans , 1972). The grammar provided here is only a small subset of a full grammar but it is more complete than anything we have considered hitherto, and it may suffice for student exercises. It should be recognised, however, that no matter how authoritative a grammar may be it will still be subject to constant improvement and amendment. The major defect of this grammar is the fact that it does not handle all agreements properly. As a result it will sometimes accept an ungrammatical sentence. It may also on occasion reject a sentence which is grammatical. The reader is invited to experiment with it to discover its shortcomings and to amend it accordingly.

9.2 Notation

In this grammar we have modified our notation slightly with the intention of improving readability and making the listing of the grammar much more compact. The slash 'I' has been replaced by the semi-colon ';' and wherever possible this has only been introduced at the end of a line. The exception is when it occurs inside a bracket. The angle brackets have been omitted, and a comma has been used to separate items which are to be 'anded'. This is permissible because we do not intend to include the comma as a terminal symbol in the grammar. The ,*, symbol prefixes an item which may be repeated, and the '?' prefixes an item which may be omitted. Brackets have been used to disambiguate expressions with mixed 'and' and 'or' logical operators. At certain points we have inserted a list of terminal symbols (words) rather than try to invent a grammatical category for them. Sometimes the list is too long for complete enumeration. On those occasions we have inserted the symbol '..' to indicate that the list is not complete. For those who find the FSD notation more readable we have provided diagrams to support the more cryptic BNF-like notation. To clarify things we provide some examples below in the old and the new notation:



Example 9.1




Example 9.2




Example 9.3




9.3 Glossary






9.4 The Grammar







9.5 Test Sentences