Grammar of the English Verb Phrase, Volume 1_ The Grammar of the English Tense System_ A Comprehensive Analysis

Grammar of the English Verb Phrase, Volume 1_ The Grammar of the English Tense System_ A Comprehensive Analysis

Introduction

I. General introductory remarks

1.1 Aims and scope of the work

1.1.1 The goal we had in mind when embarking on this work was to write a

Grammar of the English tense system which was at the same time a scientific

study and a work which could be used as a reference grammar by linguists and

students of English with a basic knowledge of descriptive linguistics and a

fairly advanced proficiency in English. Difficult as it is to reconcile these two

purposes with each other, we have attempted to write a grammar that comes

up to this double expectation.

The scientific nature of this work means that this is not just another gram-

mar of English meant to be used as a handbook and basically restricting itself

to bringing together a number of relevant data which have been revealed and

studied in the linguistic literature on the English tense system. It is meant to

be a thorough study of that tense system, based on a wealth of old and new

observations, and offering a coherent framework revealing the relations be-

tween the observations, accounting for them, and ultimately predicting most

of them. The framework is a revised version of the ‘descriptive theory’ pre-

sented in Declerck (1991). Although it is presented without unnecessary formal-

ization, it is a rigid framework which could easily be formalized and used in

formal approaches like formal semantics or computational linguistics.

In order to render the work, which deals with a complex subject matter, as

accessible as possible, we have made great efforts to set out the principles in a

very precise and detailed way. The work abounds in cross-references to other

sections and contains an extensive index which should enable the readers who

wish to look something up (for example, a term, definition, rule or principle)

to find quickly what they are looking for. Needless to say, the cross-references

and the index, as well as the extensive glossary, are also meant to realize our

second goal, viz. to provide a grammar that can be used as a reference work

by scholars and by students with some knowledge of descriptive linguistics and

of English grammar.

1.1.2 The kind of English treated is Standard British English (including both

written and spoken registers). However, there is a link to American English on

the (rare) occasions when the two languages make different choices in connec-

tion with a particular principle of the English tense system.