As a study guide to enhance your insight into English grammatical usage, this book distinguishes itself from the merely practical, pedagogical school grammar on the one hand and the specialized linguistic grammar on the other hand.

Targeted at advanced learners of English (Common European Framework level B1-B2) with an interest in the linguistic study of language, this book will be of particular interest to first- (and second-) year university students and students of other institutes of higher education who wish to acquire an insight into the grammatical usage of English. More generally, it hopes to reach anyone with a similar interest. It can be used as a course text in advanced EFL classes at university or college level, as a reference for any course addressing aspects of English grammatical usage, or as a book for self-study.

Both authors are experienced EFL teachers at university level, and experts in English grammar.

About the authors:

Anne-Marie Simon-Vandenbergen is a professor of English linguistics at Ghent University. Her research on English and contrastive grammar and pragmatics focuses on modality and discourse markers in Germanic and Romance languages. Her recent publications in the field of pragmatic markers and modal adverbs include a monograph co-authored with Karin Aijmer, The Semantic Field of Modal Certainty: A Corpus-Based Study of English Adverbs (2007).

Miriam Taverniers is a lecturer of English linguistics at Ghent University. Her research interests include metaphor, verb typologies, grammatical relations, predication, layering in grammatical models, theoretical linguistics and the historiography of linguistics. She has recently published on these topics in various international linguistic journals. She is also the author of two books: Metaphor and Metaphorology (2002) and Grammatical Metaphor as a Construction Type (2011).