Cambridge Grammar of English

The Cambridge Grammar of English, CGE, is not to be confused with the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, CGEL, which in turn is not to be confused with Longman's Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, also CGEL, with their older Grammar of Contemporary English, GCE, or indeed with their Communicative Grammar of English, another CGE. (Why do publishers do this?) Unlike the other four, the new CGE has an explicitly pedagogic slant. In just under 1,000 pages, it provides advanced students and their teachers with comprehensive but accessible coverage of British English grammar, drawing on both the Cambridge International Corpus and the CANCODE spoken corpus, and devoting considerable attention to those areas where speech and writing go their separate ways. Intelligently innovative in its arrangement, it has numerous excellent features. Pedagogic grammars present special organizational problems, since users require different kinds of information which cannot easily be presented effectively within one kind of framework. A grammar of English must of course provide a systematic, logically structured account of the morphological and syntactic categories of the language and of their various meanings and functions. However, certain categories of meaning—for instance time or modality—cut across structural divisions in complicated ways. Reconciling these two perspectives while doing justice to both is not straightforward. A pedagogic grammar also needs to accommodate small-scale reference use, since users often simply need a detached bite-sized account of one problematic topic (‘What's the difference between “mustn't” and “needn't?”’). In the case of CGE, further complexities are introduced by its deliberate foregrounding of areas where speech and writing differ importantly in their grammar.