The "Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English" is an entirely new grammar of American and British English - from the language of conversation to the language of academic textbooks. There are no made-up examples in this groundbreaking new grammar. The authors began, not with preconceived notions of the grammar of English, but with a huge bank of language data, the Longman Corpus Network. A six-year research project brought together the linguistic expertise of an international author team - all acknowledged experts in the field of corpus linguistics and grammar. The result of this research is the present volume. Many points of traditional grammar are confirmed, but now on the basis of much larger amounts of statistical data than ever before. Some aspects of traditional grammar are challenged by this book, and some new findings, not even suspected before now, will surprise and interest the reader. What makes this book so special is that it turns English inside out....