Book Description

This book is an attempt to contribute to the contrastive study of the syntax of English and Dutch. Although it is not the first contrastive grammar of the two languages to be published in Holland, it is undoubtedly the most comprehen­ sive. In writing A Contrastive Grammar of English and Dutch (henceforth CGED), we have been fortunate in having at our disposal the two most ex­ haustive descriptions of English and Dutch published to date: A Comprehen­ sive Grammar of the English Language (CGEL), by Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech and Jan Svartvik, which appeared in 1985, and the Algemene Nederlandse Spraakkunst (ANS), by G. Geerts, W. Haeseryn, J. de Rooij and M. e. van den Toorn, published in 1984. Both grammars are based on a traditional descriptive framework; this also holds true for CGED. CGED consists of two parts. Part One ('A Concise English Grammar') pro­ vides an overview of the main points of English syntax. It introduces students to the concepts and terminology they require in order to be able to compare the syntactic structures of English and Dutch. Part One consists of two chap­ ters. In Chapter 1 the questions 'What is grammar?' and 'What is contrastive grammar?' are dealt with briefly.