This book is written primarily for students of linguistics in universities and other tertiary institutions. It assumes no previous knowledge of linguistics. I have likewise made minimal assumptions about the reader's familiarity with ‘traditional grammar’ – all terms borrowed from the traditional repertoire, such as ‘noun’, ‘transitive verb’, ‘relative clause’, and so on, are fully explained. Although the book covers a fair amount of the grammar, it is not simply a short grammar of English, inasmuch as it devotes a good deal of attention to the problem of justifying the analysis proposed

It does not, however, attempt to formalise the grammar: it is not ‘generative’ – and it is not written within the framework or model of any particular contemporary school of linguistics such as ‘transformational grammar’, ‘systemic grammar’, ‘functional grammar’ or the like. It follows, rather, a ‘structural’ approach, in a very broad understanding of that term, one where the grammatical categories postulated derive from a study of the combinational and contrastive relationships the words and other forms enter into. The aim is to give a reasonably careful and precise account of major areas of English grammar that will provide a foundation for more advanced work in theoretical linguistics.