Although the concept of intransitivity has been widely employed as a central element for the description of clausal organization in most languages, it has traditionally been defined in a quite narrow and, from my point of view, inaccurate way. Thus, the most widespread conceptualization of the category of intransitivity seems to have emerged as dependent on that of transitivity, since both notions are generally seen as the two sides of the same coin: a construction can be either transitive, and thus bear a direct object, or intransitive, and hence be used with no direct object at all. However, the association of the tag intransitive with the simple idea “verb without an object” does not seem to tally with the actual complexity of linguistic usage. Indeed, as Dillin Liu (2008) points out, such an employment of the term intransitive “may be very appealing because it makes the categorization of English null-object verbs simple, but it ignores the significant semantic and syntactic differences among different types of verbs grouped under this label” (2008: 298). The inaccuracy in the use of the label intransitive may have influenced our perception of objectless verbs, which in fact constitute a far more heterogeneous group than traditional accounts of transitivity have made them appear to be. The recognition of the inadequacy in the use of the term has led me to revise the most outstanding models for the classification of English verbs used without an object (cf. Quirk et al. 1985; Biber et al. 1999; Huddleston and Pullum et al. 2002; and Liu 2008). This has allowed me to spot the important differences among the various types of English objectless verbs, as well as to single out the constructions involving so-called implicit objects as the most interesting area of study. The detailed examination of this kind of structures, both from a synchronic and a diachronic perspective, is the aim of my PhD thesis, on whose structure and content I will elaborate in the course of my presentation.

In' the beginning was 'big Quirk'-otherwise known as the 1,100-page A Grammar of Contemporary English, by Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech and Svartvik, published by Longman in 1972. The following year there came forth 'little Quirk'-the abridged version, A University Grammar of English, by Quirk and Greenham Now what' are we to do? This new book, by the same grammarians, is nearly 1,800 pages. I suppose we must call it 'the bigger Quirk', thus allowing some leeway, in case the exhaustion currently affecting this prolific team turns out to be only temporary. The new grammar is an awe-inspiring work, by any standards. The best description is to call it a 'reference grammar'~just as a dictionary can be called a 'reference lexicon'. If you want to know the meaning or use of a word, you look it up in a dictionary. Similarly, if you want to know how a grammatical construction works, or how it is used, you look it up in a grammary. The problem, of course, is that you can't organise a grammar on a simple alphabetical principle (active voice, adjectives, adverbs, antecedents, apposition, articles ... ). Actives, for instance, need to be discussed along with passives: to have one under A and the other under P would be pointless. There's only one way round this problem: any grammar book has got to have an intelligible introduction, so that readers can find their way about the book before going into it in depth; and it has got to have a large index, to aid information retrieval on detailed points. This book has both. Its 17 detailed chapters and three appendices are followed by 113 pages of index (of which I must acknowledge myself to be the compiler), and preceded by two general chapters. Chapter One introduces the language in general, and grammar in particular. Chapter Two reviews the whole field, explaining concepts and categories--a much more systematic review, incidentally, than the corresponding chapter in the big Q. If you~e new to the world of reference grammars, don't dip into this one without reading Chapter Two first. Northern Europe has brought forth many grammatical handbooks (by Jespersen, Kruisinga and others); but this latest grammar far exceeds these earlier works in breadth and depth of detail. For instance, more attention is paid to differences between the main standard varieties of English-between speech and writing, in particular, but also between many constructions that are regionally or stylistically distinctive. For anyone who had the mind, it would be quite straightforward to use the index to pull out of the grammar the 300 or so differences between British and American English, or the 500 instances of formal and informal English, to see which parts of the . language are most affected. It would have been impossible to find such things out previously: earlier grammars either ignored the fact that these differences existed, or buried the in. formation deep inside their pages so that they were all but impossible to find. The book is also immensely strong on examples of usages, and how they should be analysed. This is typical of the approach of these grammarians, who have made good use of the files of the Survey of English Usage at University College, London. There's nothing worse than a grammar based solely on the impressions or intuitions of an author-as is unfortunately all too common in popular paperbacks on usage. This grammar avoids that problem. In

ABSTRACT: In this paper we report the results of our investigations into the positions of adverbial clauses in a subset of the British ICE corpus. The subset consists of 42 texts drawn from six text types, three from written English and three from spoken English. We manually marked the adverbial clauses for their positions relative to their host clause, and for their semantic types. The paper attempts to identify some of the factors which influence the choice of position for various types of adverbial clause. Focussing on if‐clauses and when‐clauses, we conclude that, contrary to our expectations, clause length is not a significant positional factor. However, the semantic type of adverbial clauses does appear to be a major factor in the choice of position.

ABSTRACT:ICE (the International Corpus of English) was initiated to provide the resources for comparative studies of the Englishes used in countries where it is either a majority first language or an official additional language. The national or regional corpora that constitute the components of ICE are expected to conform to a specified common design. Software has been created to facilitate the grammatical annotation of the corpora and to enable the retrieval of lexical and grammatical information. Various applications of the data are envisaged.

World EnglishesVolume 15, Issue 1 p. 1-3 SIDNEY GREENBAUM and GERALD NELSON SIDNEY GREENBAUM, SIDNEY GREENBAUMSearch for more papers by this authorGERALD NELSON, GERALD NELSONSearch for more papers by this author SIDNEY GREENBAUM, SIDNEY GREENBAUMSearch for more papers by this authorGERALD NELSON, GERALD NELSONSearch for more papers by this author First published: March 1996 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-971X.1996.tb00087.xCitations: 1AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article.Citing Literature Volume15, Issue1March 1996Pages 1-3 RelatedInformation

There are opposing views on whether speech or writing is more complex syntactically. We investigated the complexity of clause relationships in a range of spoken and written text categories: spontaneous conversations, broadcast discussions, unscripted monologues, personal handwritten letters, academic writing, and non-academic writing. Conversations proved to be the most distinctive category. It had the highest percentage of simple clauses and the lowest percentage of both subordination and coordination. For all the other categories there is not a sharp distinction between speech and writing in any of the measures that were applied.

An outline of a new worldwide project for the study of the language

The English language a general framework verbs and auxiliaries the semantics of the verb phrase nouns and determiners pronouns adjectives and adverbs the semantics and grammar of adverbials prepositions and prepositional phrases the simple sentence sentence types and discourse functions pro-forms and ellipsis co-ordination the complex sentence syntactic and semantic functions of subordinate clauses complementation of verbs and adjectives the noun phrase theme, focus and information processing from sentences to text.

World EnglishesVolume 9, Issue 1 p. 79-83 Standard English and the international corpus of English SIDNEY GREENBAUM, SIDNEY GREENBAUM Department of English, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, UK.Search for more papers by this author SIDNEY GREENBAUM, SIDNEY GREENBAUM Department of English, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, UK.Search for more papers by this author First published: March 1990 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-971X.1990.tb00688.xCitations: 12AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume9, Issue1March 1990Pages 79-83 RelatedInformation

In ET17, Tony Fairman claimed that some descriptive grammarians are becoming prescriptive and that they risk presenting ‘Standard English’ as if it were all of English or at least the only English that matters. ET asked four professional grammarians to respond to his observations. Sidney Greenbaum and John Sinclair were specifically named by Tony Fairman.

World EnglishesVolume 7, Issue 3 p. 315-315 A proposal for an international computerized corpus of English SIDNEY GREENBAUM, SIDNEY GREENBAUM Department of English, University College London, Gower Street, London WCIE 6BT, UK.Search for more papers by this author SIDNEY GREENBAUM, SIDNEY GREENBAUM Department of English, University College London, Gower Street, London WCIE 6BT, UK.Search for more papers by this author First published: November 1988 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-971X.1988.tb00241.xCitations: 28AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article.Citing Literature Volume7, Issue3November 1988Pages 315-315 RelatedInformation