Abstract:

We must certainly give Gareth King the credit of putting the more informal varieties of the language on the map of linguistic description. However, when a work titled ‘Comprehensive Grammar’ professes on its first page the conviction that ‘… for the serious student of any language, grammar is a key to understanding and not an obstacle’ (vii), it is not over-rash to suspect the author has (or has had) some deep-lying misgivings about ‘grammar’. The book before us, I fear, amply confirms this inference.