The Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English is a revolutionary, corpus-based reference grammar of English, based on a groundbreaking research project to analyze the ways in which English grammar is really used. The book looks at four text types ' conversation, fiction, news reportage, and academic prose ' and reports statistical findings as well as examining the reasons that condition a particular grammatical choice.

• Encompasses a six-year research project into the ways in which language is really used.
• Reveals which structures, tenses, and lexical choices occur, and how their distribution differs in different text types.
• Analyzes natural language in each chapter, based on analysis of the real everyday conversations in the Longman Spoken American Corpus and the British National Corpus.
• Contains over 350 tables and graphs that show the frequency of constructions across different registers, from conversation to fiction to academic prose.