English Grammar is a textbook both for the training of teachers in universities and colleges and for the use of all German learners of the English language. Its main purpose is to provide a guide to the English language as a means of communication. It takes the sentence in all its various forms and functions as the main unit of communication and proceeds from this basis to investigate and explain grammatical phenomena. Thus units | of language below sentence-level, such as phrases and word-classes, are treated as essential sentence-components. The book combines new insights provided by modern linguistics with the well established results of the English grammatical tradition. It views language both as a system and as a social activity. This comprehensive approach helps to make the continuous reading of chapters or parts of chapters both interesting and instructive. A selective glossary explains terms that may be unfamiliar to the reader.
An index provides easy reference to particular points.