Longman Grammar of spoken and written English :Book Review

Based on a corpus of over 40 million words of American and British English text from conversation, fiction, newspapers, academic prose, nonconversational speech, and general prose, Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (LGSWE) is a comprehensive reference describing and empirically analyzing language patterns in actual use. Computational analysis of the corpus yielded quantitative results about grammatical patterns, which were verified and functionally interpreted by the linguists. The innovative, corpus-based approach of LGSWE adds a new dimension to knowledge about English grammar as found in the previous Longman reference, Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, and Svartviks A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (1985). This descriptive study of authentic language is presented in 14 chapters divided into five thematic areas. Chapter 1 introduces the methodology used to compile and analyze the corpus. Organized in a bottom-up fashion, chapters 2 and 3 provide descriptions of basic grammatical units (e.g., nouns, determiners, phrases or clauses) and an overview of their patterns of use; in chapters 47, the authors give a detailed account of how each of the basic grammatical units is used in the corpus; chapters 810 deal with the use of complex structures, such as complement clauses and adverbials; and chapters 1114 present issues of grammar in context (i.e., grammatical choices used to optimize communication). The analyses illustrate the interdependence of language structure and use. As a reference grammar, LGSWE contains theoretical definitions and characterizations of grammatical features as well as copious examples
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from the corpus. When a more detailed presentation of a feature is necessary, sections detailing corpus findings summarize grammatical generalizations drawn from the corpus in bullet format. Interpretive commentaries follow in sections. The sections on findings present contrasts in the occurrence of grammatical features as well, such as the distribution of negative forms by register. The interpretive commentaries highlight discourse characteristics of communicative language in addition to grammatical differences between speech and writing. Numerous tables and figures condense quantitative information into an easily accessible form. A summary table of contents, along with a more detailed listing of the books contents, and lexical and topical indexes ease the readers burden in navigating .such a large reference work