Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English - Hardcover

The Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English is a revolutionary, corpus-based reference grammar of English, based on a groundbreaking research project to analyze the ways in which English grammar is really used. The book looks at four text types ¿ conversation, fiction, news reportage, and academic prose ¿ and reports statistical findings as well as examining the reasons that condition a particular grammatical choice.

• Encompasses a six-year research project into the ways in which language is really used.
• Reveals which structures, tenses, and lexical choices occur, and how their distribution differs in different text types.
• Analyzes natural language in each chapter, based on analysis of the real everyday conversations in the Longman Spoken American Corpus and the British National Corpus.
• Contains over 350 tables and graphs that show the frequency of constructions across different registers, from conversation to fiction to academic prose.

Douglas Biber is Professor of Applied Linguistics (English Department) at Northern Arizona University.  His books and articles deal with language use in spoken and written discourse.