Geoffrey N. Leech

This is a pedagogical and reference grammar book. This third edition, which includes more examples taken from various language sources, will provide help to teachers, advanced learners and undergraduates students of English. A workbook will also accompany this edition.

English grammar book that goes into great detail and specifics about everything grammatical. Covers both spoken and written English, with many corpus and graph examples to help explain concepts and uses. Technical but written simply, though some passages are complex.

From the time when we started collaborating as a team in the 1960s, we envisaged not a grammar but a series of grammars. In 1972, there appeared the first volume in this series, A Grammar of Contemporary English (GCE). This was followed soon afterwards by two shorter works, A Communicative Grammar of English (CGE) and A University Grammar of English (UGE), published in the United States with the title A Concise Grammar of Contemporary English. With A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, we attempt something much more ambitious: a culmination of our joint work, which results in a grammar that is considerably larger and richer than GCE and hence superordinate to it. Yet, as with our other volumes since GCE, it is also a grammar that incorporates our own further research on grammatical structure as well as the research of scholars worldwide who have contributed to the description of English and to developments in linguistic theory. - Preface.

This book presents a rhetorical model of pragmatics. Geoffrey Leech argues for a rapprochement between linguistics and the traditional discipline of rhetoric, maintaining that the language system in the abstract must be studied in relation to a fully developed theory of language use. Over the years, pragmatics -- the study of the use and meaning of utterances to their situations -- has become a more and more important branch of linguistics, as the inadequacies of a purely formalist, abstract approach to the study of language have become more evident. This book presents a rhetorical model of pragmatics: that is, a model which studies linguistic communication in terms of communicative goals and principles of 'good communicative behaviour'. In this respect, Geoffrey Leech argues for a rapprochement between linguistics and the traditional discipline of rhetoric. He does not reject the Chomskvan revolution of linguistics, but rather maintains that the language system in the abstract -- i.e. the 'grammar' broadly in Chomsky's sense -- must be studied in relation to a fully developed theory of language use. There is therefore a division of labour between grammar and rhetoric, or (in the study of meaning) between semantics and pragmatics.