A masterpiece of English grammar book; Huddleston, R. and Pullum, G. K. (2002) Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, Cambridge; Cambridge University Press.
1, I have never seen such a great work.
More than 1700 pages. In depth, thorough explanations. If you read Huddleston and Pullum (2002), you understand what I mean. This book covers almost all areas of English grammar. I had some sketchy knowledge on English grammar. Most of what I know about English grammar came from Andrew Radford’s books. However, his books were on Generative Grammar, so things treated on the books were centered on phenomena which are important in Generative Grammar field. For example, Andrew Radford explained thoroughly about WH-movement, agreement, complementizers, relative clauses and so on. I was like an expert on such things, but I did not know much about English grammar in general.
At that time, I found this work by Huddleston and Pullum in 2002. They analyzed every aspect of English from a variety of view. Almost all of linguistic fields were covered by this book. Auxiliary verbs, nouns, pronouns, relative clause, several types of relative clauses, information structurers, they cover all of them. So, if you study the English Language seriously, you should read this book.
2, I read from the beginning to the end.
I read all of the book. I learned a lot. But I do not recommend this way of reading such a long book. I was exhausted when I finished the book. It took about three months to finish it. This book is so long that if you attempt to read every page carefully, you are depressed. So, you should check chapters or sections you like.
