Essentials of Mastering English: A Concise Grammar

Aimed specifically at undergraduate students of English (native and non-native) at universities, business schools and teachers’ training colleges, this text is correspondingly less detailed, and difficult topics have been made more easily accessible. It provides an introduction to basic grammatical terms and to elementary syntactic description, enabling students to analyse sentences and utterances down to word level with a specification of both the form and the function of all constituents. The book offers a thorough treatment of a great number of significant areas in English grammar: subject-predicator concord, tense, aspect, mood, modal verbs, determiners, the genitive, comparison, voice, negation, constituent order (including subject-predicator inversion, position and order of modifiers and adverbials, topicalization and focalization, extraposition, dislocation and clefting), etc. All rule-presentation is richly exemplified. In addition to a word index and a subject index, it includes a comprehensive glossary, in which all important terms and concepts employed in the grammar are briefly defined and exemplified. In a separate appendix the author provides tips on pronunciation and spelling in connection with the inflection of verbs, nouns, adjectives and adverbs.