Grammar, etymologically speaking, is related to glamour. Though few people mightclaim that grammar is glamorous in the modern sense, there is considerable interest inEnglish grammar today and no shortage of grammar books, ranging from small basicbooks aimed at children or elementary-level foreign learners, through more advancedmanuals to large scholarly works. The trouble is—they may be about the same language,but they do not always speak the same language. The very range of the grammar bookson offer presents problems.There are many ways of describing grammar, and a wealth of terminology. Some of itstrikes the layman as jargon (disjunct, matrix, pro-form, stative); other words appearordinary enough but conceal specialized meanings (comment, focus, specific). Worse, thesame terms, old or new—comparison, formal, pronoun, reported speech, root, stress—areused by different grammarians with different meanings.Such difficulties are not entirely avoidable. Any subject of study needs specialistwords. Different grammarians are entitled to analyse language in different ways, andfresh viewpoints may call for new terms. But while grammarians sometimes explainwhat they mean by a new or unusual term, it is rarer for them to point out that theyare using an existing term in a different way. This is a cause of real confusion. Anotherproblem is that new terms may in the end turn out simply to be alternatives for an oldconcept—a synonym in fact (e.g. progressive, continuous).We have tried in this dictionary to indicate the range and variety of meanings thatmay lie behind a single term. The main emphasis is on the terminology of currentmainstream grammar, but we have also included a considerable number of entries onthe related areas of speech and meaning—more grandly known as phonetics andsemantics. Users will also find some terms from Generative Grammar, which hasgreatly influenced mainstream grammar in recent years—but some of the moretheoretical terminology of linguistics and semantics is excluded. We have also on thewhole excluded outdated grammatical terminology, apart from a few traditional termswhich may be familiar to the general reader.The authors would like to thank Professor Flor Aarts, of the Katholieke Universiteit,Nijmegen, who read an early draft of the book: his comments, we believe, have led tomany improvements, but the authors are alone responsible for any blemishes thatremain. We would also like to thank our families for their support, encouragement,and, at times, forbearance.scescwLondon, Oxford 1993