Author Profile

David Anderson studied English at UCL, completing his BA, MA and PhD in the department before spending a year as a Research Associate in the UCL Urban Lab, where he co-organised the City, Essay, Film symposium and screening series. From 2019 to 2023, he was a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow in the Centre for Anglo-German Cultural Relations, Queen Mary University of London. In 2022 he was also a visiting Research Fellow at the Leibniz-Centre for Literary and Cultural Research, Berlin. He has taught English and European literature at UCL, QMUL and City Lit. He has taught English Language and theoretical Linguistics at several universities since the mid-1990s, particularly in his specialisms of grammatical theory (what languages have in common and in what ways they vary) and pragmatic theory (how language actually gets used to communicate in real life settings). Currently at Westminster, his teaching includes introductory Linguistics, pragmatics and dissertation supervisions. He is a Principal Lecturer in English Language and Linguistics and a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Following a PhD in theoretical generative linguistics supervised by Joseph Emonds, his initial research focused on the closed class (‘grammatical’) words in South Slavic languages (Bulgarian, Serbo-Croat) and English. In more recent years, he has combined his linguistic interests with a return to the study of literature, pursuing both formal and pragmatic accounts. Formally, he has focused on aspects of literary texts such as the characterisation of parallel structures in literary texts, and the locative inversion construction. In terms of pragmatic theory, he is interested in the development of relevance theory in relation to literary texts, examining what it can reveal about the reading process and our engagement with the interplay between linguistic and non-linguistic structure in literary texts. Some of this research has focused on the work of Muriel Spark. His work has appeared in the Journal of Literary Semantics, Journal of Slavic Linguistics, and various edited volumes. As a complement to all the theory, he has published short stories in Stand, Succour, Riptide and a couple of short story collections, and occasionally English longer works of fiction.

About The Book

The grammar of a language is a dynamic, constantly changing set of habit patterns that allows people to communicate with one another. For some reason, many in academia and language teaching seem to have lost sight of this common sense truth, preferring to treat grammar as though it were an object, outside of human beings in society, consisting of absolute categories and rules. This misperception has led to a deep tension between theoreticians and the practical needs of language teachers, whose students often come to believe that grammar is a tedious classroom subject, to be endured as a kind of rite of passage, rather than a key to the amazing world of human communication. In recent years linguistics has begun to recognize the importance of language in use to general understandings of human cognition, communication, and culture. This orientation, combined with developments in computational technology, has led to more pragmatic, data-driven, theoretical perspectives as linguists look at the way people actually communicate rather than the ideal systems enshrined in countless books of the last century. This book attempts to bring current linguistic understandings to bear on practical tasks, such as language teaching, learning, and translating. It attempts to balance systematicity with creativity, absolutism with flexibility. It takes into account the fact that grammar is thoroughly human, deeply linked with culture and identity, and stunningly complex. Language is primarily a tool for communication, yet many books still treat English grammar as simply a set of rules and facts to be memorized by rote. This book is made for students who are frustrated with this approach and would like instead to understand grammar and how it works. Why are there two future tenses in English? What are auxiliaries and why are they so confusing? Why are English motion verbs hard to use? Why are determiners so important in English? These and many other frequently asked questions are answered in this book.

Table of Contents

Preface
1. NOUNS AND NOUN PHRASES IN LINGUISTIC PERSPECTIVE
2. VERBS AND VERB PHRASES IN LINGUISTIC PERSPECTIVE
3. ADJECTIVES AND ADVERBS IN LINGUISTIC PERSPECTIVE
4. DETERMINING WORDS AND PREPOSITIONS IN LINGUISTIC PERSPECTIVE
5. PARTICIPANTS, FUNCTIONS, AND ROLES
6. TRANSITIVITY AND INTRANSITIVITY
7. TENSE AND ASPECT
8. MODALITY AND NEGATION
9. QUESTIONS AND FOCUS CONSTRUCTIONS
10. COMPLEX SENTENCES IN ENGLISH COORDINATION AND SUBORDINATION
Bibliography
Index