Ronald Carter and Michael McCarthy, Cambridge grammar of English: A comprehensive guide . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. x + 973 pp., optionally with CD-ROM.

This is a grammar of British English for those concerned with English as a Second Language (ESL). It results from a seven-year research project ‘informed by’ the Cambridge International Corpus of 700 million words, including the Cambridge and Nottingham Corpus of Discourse in English (CANCODE) containing 5 million words of spoken English. The book contains an Introduction (19 pp.); an A–Z component dealing with over a hundred individual words, or groups of words (141 pp.); 33 unnumbered chapters grouped into sets named ‘Spoken language’ (78 pp.), ‘Grammar and discourse’ (54 pp.), ‘Word and phrase classes’ (22 pp.), ‘Nouns’ (77 pp.), ‘Verbs’ (43 pp.), ‘Adjectives and adverbs’ (24 pp.), ‘Prepositions and particles’ (9 pp.), ‘Word formation’ (15 pp.), ‘Sentence and clause patterns’ (112 pp.), ‘Time’ (40 pp.), ‘Notions and functions’ – modality, speech acts, etc. – (140 pp.), ‘Information packaging’ (48 pp.); nine appendices – ‘Punctuation’, ‘North American English grammar’, etc. – (64 pp.); Glossary (41 pp.); Bibliography (5 pp.); Index (37 pp.).1 The book can be bought alone or with a useful CD-ROM containing the text in searchable format, audio recordings of examples and links to The Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary. The ESL orientation of the book is reflected in the inclusion of numerous helpful ‘error warnings’ drawing attention to mistakes commonly made by ESL learners. The ordering of the material means that the basic description of the grammar does not begin until p. 295, though a good deal of it is inevitably presupposed in the early chapters. It seems likely that this order of presentation is motivated by the wish to give prominence to the discussion of spoken English, for Carter & McCarthy (henceforth C&M) regard it as a major feature of the book that the CANCODE corpus has enabled them to avoid the bias towards the written language that is found in most books on English grammar (p. 9). It is certainly good to have a large number of examples from a spoken corpus, and the Spoken Language set of chapters provide a useful account of features that are characteristic of speech rather than writing. However, C&M do not deal satisfactorily with the problem of dysfluency and performance errors in spontaneous speech.