📄 Dypedahl, Magne, Hilde Hasselgård and Berit Løken. 2006. Introducing English Grammar. Bergen: Fagbok-forlaget. pp. 165.

Summary

This is a short review by Anna-Lena Fredriksson, not a research paper. It covers Introducing English Grammar (Dypedahl, Hasselgård and Løken, 2006), a contrastive English grammar written for Norwegian students in teacher training and introductory university courses. The book builds a picture of language as a hierarchy: words combine into phrases, phrases into clauses, and clauses into sentences. It then turns to the elements that make up a clause, the various kinds of clause and the ordering of words, before finishing with cohesion, coherence and register. Its stance is descriptive with a functional slant. It regularly compares English with Norwegian, and it marks known learner trouble spots in separate notes. The reviewer likes that difficult topics get chapters of their own, such as it/there and subject–verb concord, and that the treatment of modality goes beyond auxiliaries. She also finds some explanations too brief. Indefinite pronouns get little attention, and conditionals and the subjunctive are missing. She would have liked an exercise package. Overall she judges the book a clear, useful foundation for first-term students.

Key points

• The book has 16 chapters and 165 pages, published by Fagbokforlaget in Bergen. Every chapter closes with a list of key terms.
• There are three appendices: irregular verbs, punctuation rules, and an English–Norwegian glossary of terms with chapter references.
• Aspect, modality and the passive each get a chapter, following the chapter on verbs, tense and time.
• The modality chapter covers modal adverbs and modal adjectives as well as modal auxiliaries. The concord chapter includes agreement inside relative clauses and with nominalised adjectives.
• The reviewer names these gaps: most indefinite pronouns and quantifying determiners (only some/any are treated), conditional sequences, the subjunctive, and the lack of exercises.

Interesting ideas

• I1. The book models language as nested levels that can be taken apart and put back together, which makes the structure itself the object of teaching.
• I2. Phenomena that learners find hard, such as dummy it and existential there, get their own treatment instead of being folded into the general pronoun chapter.
• I3. Modality is treated as a meaning spread across word classes, covering auxiliaries, adverbs and adjectives together.
• I4. Agreement is examined in less obvious places, such as relative clauses and nominalised adjectives like "the rich", instead of only plain subject–verb pairs.
• I5. Each chapter pairs its explanation with a fixed term list, and the reviewer notes that practice exercises are still needed for real learning.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

• I1 (tree): The same decomposition and reassembly could serve as a check on UD trees, confirming that the parsed phrases and clauses reassemble into the original sentence.
• I2 (frames): Expletive it/there could get a dedicated rule so that they are never assigned an agent or theme role when frames are built.
• I3 (world): A single modality attribute in the text world could collect evidence from may, probably and likely, so that every hedged state carries the same kind of certainty marker.
• I4 (learn): Such concord cases would make good negative-control test items, showing whether the parser and tagger have really learned agreement or only memorised simple patterns.
• I5 (answer): School-course tests could be generated chapter by chapter from term lists like these, filling the exercise gap and measuring Mova's grammar knowledge topic by topic.