Product Description
Originally published in 1884.This volume from the Cornell University Library's print collections was scanned on an APT BookScan and converted to JPG 2000 format by Kirtas Technologies.All titles scanned cover to cover and pages may include marks notations and other marginalia present in the original volume. ... Read more

Product Description
This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

Product Description
This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process.We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

Product Description
This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process.We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

Product Description
This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

Product Description
This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

Product Description
This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

Product Description
Written by one of the world's leading grammarians, The Oxford English Grammar is an authoritative review of and topic reference for English grammar.

Opening with an outline of national, regional, and social variation in English, the book details descriptive and prescriptive approaches and attitudes to English among both native and non-native speakers. This is followed by an account of the development of grammar, and a review of modern approaches to this complex subject. The central section of the book is a presentation of current English grammar at sentence, clause, phrase, and word level; with the last chapters covering grammar in relation to discourse, word-formation, lexis, pronunciation and intonation, punctuation, and spelling. A full index is provided, and examples of usage are drawn from a wide range of sources, including use of the new international Corpus of English at University College London.

Written in a readable and absorbing style, The Oxford English Grammar is an essential reference for English speakers around the world. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (10)

Lacks completeness; difficult for reference
First of all, I'm not a scholar.I wanted to learn greek, but found my English grammar lacking.In many areas this would certainly help in learning the grammar of a foreign language.The index uses sections rather than pages in looking up a subject.The sections can be quite long and finding the particular item may be timely."Periphrastic tenses" for instance.I never could get a clear/complete definition of what this is.I still use it more than my other less complete/elementary grammar texts.But it is not ideal for what I need.I am still learning the layout of subject matter.It certainly is not intuitive--for a non-scholar anyway.

First-rate reference
I am seldom disappointed with Oxford language products, and this volume is certainly an excellent one. The book is logically formatted and is written clearly and concisely.
It is well worth the investment if you are looking for a comprehensive but accessible English reference.

A bit disappointed
The Oxford line of reference books is generally the best one can find. I was expecting the same quality of content and printing in this work as is found in their dictionaries, thesauri and other reference books. As a previous reviewer has stated, the paper is a bit cheap; but what matters to me more is the content. I do not understand why reference works would EVER discuss improper grammar. It should not be printed in any book, much less a reference book. I have no respect for those who try to make arguments for "the natural evolution of language," et cetera. People ALREADY know how to speak improperly, why would a grammar book give examples of such? It is almost as if this book were written for someone who had never heard "who should I write this letter to?" I imagine an English Lord in his castle, lying on a Chaise, reading this book and wondering why the "plebeians" employ such odd prepositional-pronoun separation; "And wherefore have they discarded the m?" I understand that this is not a usage guide, but - as a Germanist who loves language - I cannot imagine this book helping anyone improve their language skills. I would be irate if I were to purchase "The Duden German Grammar" and find that it did not distinguish between proper and colloquial grammar. Tell me, what purpose is a GRAMMAR REFERENCE book other than to help one understand a language's correct usage? This book should be called "Printed Examples of Colloquial English Without a `Whom' in Sight!" Find another book on which to spend $45.

Excellent resource for teachers, journalists, and advanced students
I read this book as an English teacher in my annual *tour d'horizon* of the language I teach.

I discovered long ago, in learning formal grammar for computer science, that in general the relationship between any grammar and the language considered as "the set of valid sentences" (a precise set in computer language: an epistemologically fuzzy set in human language: but, a set) is many to one.

This is a fascinating concept because it dissolves as in a spell, as in an haruspication, as in a charm, the gibbering ghosts of graveyard grammar who insist that concepts such as "gerund" are only known if you use the word "gerund", and that furthermore the structures that they've imposed are the only possible structures.

Generations of urchins have been belabored by the false science of grammar, and it has created revolutions as in 1848.

Whereas there are several ways of parsing any given computer language, all of them "correct" depending on what you want to do; for example, in computer science, a-b-c has an obvious left to right parse which happens to generate the wrong answer on a typical "stack machine" as does a/b/c.

Which means that your students don't have to know about the "gerund" considered as a label, but they should know what happens when a verb is suffixed with ing. I call a "gerund" the "ing word".

This bridges the gap between traditional grammar, which despite all its apparent proto-scientific precision is really only the exhausting and dispiriting autopsy of the contents of the mind of some long-dead grammarian, and modern styles of English teaching which avoid grammar as they would the Black Plague...and which thereby end up discriminating in favor of girls, who in many cultures and on the whole naturally read and write, while boys prefer many activities, from shooting off their mouths to setting off squibs to blowing Headmaster's study up with nitroglycerine, to reading and writing.

The girls absorb good habits from their Improving Books such as Pride and Prejudice (an excellent book that needs only Indians, pirates, and nitroglycerine to be tippy-top-ho). The boys produce sentences of which they are inordinately proud, in my experience, but cannot de-engage brain from mouth and engage hand to write, because, again in my experience, they have insufficient exposure to the written model. Swotting the boys with formal methods derived from grammar often calms them down: sentence diagrams and a systematic exploration of all possible indicative tenses as a forced march is useful.

"Right, *mes enfants*, march or die: now we shall examine what I call the pluperfect."

I don't really know if the authors of the Oxford English Grammar know this, but they instinctively as linguists, and most assuredly NOT as "language curmudgeons", those unpleasant latter-day journalists and other waterflies who patrol ideas while pretending to patrol usage, give a tour not only of Received but also alternative English, mentioning at least Black English and the English of the north of England as proper systems i' their oon rrright.

It is a fascinating thought to me that the features of argot, patois and other forms of "uneducated" English such as a smaller number of forms of the verb "to be" as in "I be chillin' widdat" would be praised were they design features of a computer language, and that in learning English inflections, we're learning a rather inefficient system of communication.

Which is why, I believe, the language teacher needs to be studiedly neutral in the presentation of English. Its dominance a historical accident, having mostly to do with the willingness of jolly tars, mad bishops, and disgraced Earls to sail merrily into foreign ports with guns blazing and later, the fact that the last man standing in 1945 was GI Joe.

The French teacher on the other hand might well be permitted to strut and fret given that France is not a world power because of historical accident and that by any aesthetic measure, French is more pleasant.

But I digress. I recommend this book NOT to the student, but to her Teacher, or if Teacher, you are on a budget, the cheaper but more terse "Oxford Reference Grammar".

[More terse? Oh dear. How could I use an uninflected one-syllable comparative? Is not the rule that we must use inflections with all words of one syllable?]

[I do so because the rule applies to older words which like old people retain old usage habits. "More small" is obviously incorrect because small is an old word whereas terse is more recent.]

[However, I get about only 33000 Google hits for "more terse", many of them computer science centric: I get 84000 for "terser".]

[But, *stare decisis* and I'm the Daddy, that's why. "Terser" **sounds wrong** because the inflections belong to an olde English.]

[Aaaargh and belabor me with a lexicon, else. American English comes according to my British mates from Western counties where the lads went to sea, boys, and let her [Kate, in the Tempest] go hang. That is why we be rhotic and why it is easy for Americans to talk like Pirates, belubber me with a marlinspike, holystone the lazarette, luff the chuffersail and burn me buttocks, else.]

[But: I digress.]

I didn't like it.
I am a brazilian student. I prefer that book instead because it is more pedagogical:

Cambridge Grammar of English Paperback with CD ROM: A Comprehensive Guide (Cambridge Grammar of English) ... Read more

Product Description

This alphabetical guide clearly defines standard grammatical terms and shows how they are used, encompassing variants as found in Huddleston and Pullum'sCambridge Grammar of the English Language.

Product Description
This book is designed especially for the literary student of English, and provides a single compact grammar primarily concerned with Classical Old English, rather than the other Old English dialects.The book takes a descriptive approach and avoids assuming a knowledge of Germanic philology.The introduction provides a minimum background of knowledge and indicates the kinds of evidence on which the grammatical description is based. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

A Very Useful, Informative and Practical Grammatical Lexicon
As the preface to this edition indicates, this Grammar is designed for the literary student of English as opposed to the student of philology. Thus, the emphasis is on practical issues of the language. In other words, it eschews lengthy and digressive forays into the history or context of certain linguistic developments (though it does touch on certain essential matters) and focuses instead on the issues most pertinent to one who wishes to begin mastering the basics and intermediate elements of the language, such as inflexions, cases, syntactical issues. One does not need to bring a broad basis of linguuistic training/experience to bear; but one should keep in mind that it is presented like a traditional lexicon one might encounter in Latin or Greek, i.e., no handholding through the practical elements of the language - nor is it riddled with practice sentences or parallel examples in ModE. For those, however, who want to undertake a rigorous and systematic study of the basics of OE, this is a veryhandy and practical Grammar reference with which to begin such an endeavor.

Not for those unaquainted with the Old English language
This is not the most well-organized Old English Grammar in existence, but it does serve a certain purpose.There is a wealth of information and interesting tid-bits of philological lore, but it is not an introduction to the language by any means (just a warning).Those who do have an understanding of the language would do well to own it, at least for reference purposes, but there are much better and more concise grammars available. ... Read more

Product Description
For courses in advanced grammar. Best-seller. Practical, ecelectic approach with a systematic approach to learning grammar. New: Chapter 1 on history of grammar pedagogy, "Classrom Applications," co-author Funk, section on rhetoric of punctuation (Ch. 14). ... Read more

Customer Reviews (13)

Grammer
This book was here quickly and when shipped back after
dropping a class, money was put back in my account
quickly...great way to buy a book!!!

The Product VS The Supplier
The book that I received was in great condition! The timing that I received the book in was horrible! The company did not supply a tracking number so that I could estimate the time in which I would receive the package and I feel as if I wasted money paying for express shipping!Exercise Book for Understanding English Grammar

Understanding English Grammar, Um, Okay
Actually, Understanding English Grammar (8th Edition) (UEG) is a well-written textbook and workbook with many SERIOUS mistakes included in both the textbook and the workbook.

I rated this book one star for several reasons:

The book is tiny.I am fat and have fat fingers.This book may as well have been a little joke book contained in a package of Cracker Jacks.

The book has several directional mistakes in addtion to spelling errors where correct spelling is needed.(IUN Professor Allegrezza caught several mistakes and misprints; my classmates caught other mistakes andmisprints.I am taking credit here for their discoveries.LOL.)

The book was printed in an ugly font.I am used to elegance and visual clarity in textbooks.If you want me to learn challenging material and want me to believe your spin, put the words in a crisp, clean-looking font, like Ariel.

The book's cover is ugly.While the blue is multi-pastel and aqua-looking, that part of the book seems to me to convey tranquility.Then again, the design puts me to sleep.The design should not put anyone to sleep since the material is challenging and expanding.A more vibrant color, like orange or yellow, may liven up the focus on what may be potentially dreary, challenging material for some.Heck, even a picture of an orange or a lemon may work.Moreover, that big blotch of dingy lime green on the front cover is a major eyesore.In fact, that big blotch of nasty Army green made me want to vomit.And if you don't like the description of the front, you will NOT like the back cover.It is worse.

The authors did not take the time to consider the exciting and the serious nature of English Grammar and Usage.For example, the words and the sentences used as examples in the book and in the study guide are archaic.While some arcaic words and sentences used are appropriate, the majority of sentences were not cutting-edge to excite the student to actually want to participate in the exciting way English can be understood.While the authors went out of their way to be inclusive (to new directions in English [with the ESL and the consideration of Ebonics]), MAJOR kudos to them for that.However, the Standard English used in the book is more late-50's and early-60's-oriented for people who live in exclusive communities without a hint of race, of ethnocentricity, or of GLBT sexual orientation.In other words, this book was written for a specific audience-- suburban Whites who are still listening to radio channels that air music from the '50's and the '60's (Good music, but... integrate all ready!For heaven's sake, the U.S. President is black.)Language should reflect the people who speak it.Language should not be used to educate the few exclusive people who want to keep English for themselves for personal power to subjugate others.The authors need to throw a little somethin'-sumpin' in to it:LaShaniqua picked her afro.Roberto ate tamales for lunch.Billy-Bob strummed his guitar at the dance.The authors need to make the language they use come alive for the students who are to learn it.Dumbing down the reality of English Usage hurts everyone who speaks it.

There is not enough exclamation about the book as a new grammatical approach to English Grammar and Usage.This book is not your grand-ma-ma's book from some "Traditional Grammar" era.This is a cutting-edge book, using Structural and Transformational grammar.BE EXCITED ABOUT IT.The presentation of the overall material is a SEDATIVE in itself.While the outline is concise, the chapter editing is not to die for.This non-traditional grammar NEEDS new, contemporary-usage examples.

The book is too expensive.If the authors expect for people to pay exorbitant prices, for a substandard piece of crap like the UEG, then the authors need to value-add bells and whistles to justify the cost.

There IS NOT an Annotated Instructor's Edition (AIE) available on Amazon.com or other sites.The AIE is sold only on the Longman Pearson website.Selling this book and its guide in one location is enough proof that this book is a spin-doctor's creation.That means, someone added a bunch of words to a seriously concise book to artifically inflate the book's value.Plus, the AIE's absence from the market tells the consumer that the book is some sort of prototype with plenty of KNOWN errors in it.Moreover, I habitually purchase AIE's because, sometimes, my professors are wrong.Since I cannot understand the professor's explanation of covered material from time to time, I often find that reading the AIE helps me understand what the professor could not get across to me.It benefits us both.

Did I mention that the book is too tiny?

What makes the UEG well-written is that the information is outlined very well and transitions gracefully from idea to idea.Unfortunately, my instructor did not follow the printed outline.He chose to start at the beginning and then move to the back of the book.While his pattern of chapter orientation made sense, his redirection of chapter navigation was to allow students coming from Traditional Grammar backgrounds to learn something completely different cold-turkey:Structural and Transformational Grammar Usage.

I love this book.I have highlighted all over it.However, my reasons to dislike the book are serious enough for any English major to consider.I hope Kolln and Funk can get it together to make a way-better 9th edition.

I paid full-price for this book.In fair disclosure, I anticipate an "F" from this class.
Hey, I have a life.Sometimes life happens. Intensive study time, as this subject demands, was forgone.My time was given to the tumultuous relationship with my boyfriend.

If you buy this book, buy it used!Good day.

used book
Fast delivery, but this used book wasn't in such a good condition as it was described ("very good"). A lot of the text is highlighted; the pages have many dog-ears and are damaged by water, especially the last ones.

don't try to learn English grammar from this
I was very disappointed. I expected a readable, well-organized explanation of the rules of English grammar and punctuation that would also function as a reference. Instead, I found it to be rather poorly explained, hard to follow, and focused on issues I didn't care about. The book is basically descriptive grammar, which tries (as I understand it) to deduce the rules of the language rather than state them. I just want to know what I should or should not do, or when there's disagreement I want that stated. Complicated terminology was used and then later introduced. The sentence diagramming tended to confuse me rather than help.

You're a lot better off with a good style guide. I recommend the New York Public Library Guide to Style and Usage. You can read it from cover to cover if you have the time, and everything is very clearly and systematically explained. ... Read more

Product Description
Efficient, systematic instruction in all the grammar needed for speech and comprehension: parts of speech, pronunciation, word order, negation and more. Useful phrases, glossary of grammatical terms included in this perfect adjunct to a language course or for independent study.
... Read more

Customer Reviews (16)

Great resource
Very good resource.Covers all the main points in the right amount of detail.However it wasn't easy for me to just pick up and understand completely on the first read through - going over it again certainly helps.

Some things I didn't like: it puts the formation of different cases before the usage.I just ended up reading them out of order, since that made a lot more sense to me.Also, it doesn't have all the main common sayings - an extended list would have been nice.Other than that, great book.

very impressive
This grammar review is superior to any that I already have. Not only is it simply written, but it is quite comprehensive.

review
This is a good reference book that can be used to look up any of the complexities of Russian grammar.

Worth it!
Very nice little compact book! Worth it for anyone who is struggling with difficult Russian grammar.

An excellent aid
This short book is packed with useful aids to improving your grasp of Russian. It is easy to understand, concise, and accurate.This is easily the best single book I have found to assist the student in learning Russian.It's small enough to be a carry-around reference guide that can be read at odd times of the day in hotel rooms, in taxis, and on mashrutki.The quality of the type-face is excellent so you can peruse this book even in fairly poor light.The examples are elegant and the vocabulary is always germane to everyday needs.I can't recommend this too highly to anyone who is serious about achieving moderate fluency in the Russian language. ... Read more

Product Description
Unlike most grammar series, this one simplifies and clarifies what is often perceived as the most difficult aspect of learning a foreign language. Oxford Easy Grammar texts cover all the fundamental and essential points of a language's grammar in a clear and user-friendly way, with every grammatical point clearly explained and backed up by examples in English before being illustrated in the foreign language. Each area of grammar is presented on a double-page spread for easy access and navigation, with all example sentences highlighted to show what is being illustrated. Finally, a full A-Z list of grammatical terms with clear descriptions rounds out each volume. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Great little book
This is a really helpful little book, not the best french grammar book I've used, but definitely up there. There are lots of good examples and the concepts are made clear. ... Read more