Sidney Greenbaum

The Oxford English Grammar provides unique coverage of the English language for native speakers. Designed to be accessible and valuable to both the general reader and the student or language professional, it describes the language of current American and British English, with information on national, regional, and social variation. Emphasis is placed on spoken as well as written English, with a diverse range of real examples from computerized text collections of both British and American English.

The International Corpus of English is a unique linguistic and sociolinguistic project. When complete it will consist of fifteen or more parallel corpora of spoken and written English drawn from countries where English is either a majority first language or an official second language. Part I introduces the ICE project and a sub-project that investigates writing by advanced learners of English. Part II describes in detail the design of the corpora, the markup systems for speech and writing, the ICE tagset and parsing scheme, and the software packages that have been developed for automatic tagging and parsing, and for retrieving lexical, grammatical, and sociolinguistic information. Part III discusses problems in compiling the corpora, exemplified by the experience of teams in New Zealand, East Africa, and Hong Kong. Finally, Part IV considers some of the applications envisaged for the corpora: research in linguistics, sociolinguistics, and natural language processing; teaching, language planning, and the establishment of norms for teaching and examining in second-language countries.

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.