--- title: "Modern English grammar: Morphology and syntax (a review) (2017)" description: "This is a short book review, not an empirical study. Among them: 0." authors: ["Elena Malyuga"] year: 2017 venue: "Training, Language and Culture 1" source: "https://rudn.tlcjournal.org/archive/1(2)/1(2)-07.pdf" doi: "10.29366/2017tlc.1.2.7" licence: "CC BY-NC (journal licence per DOAJ; Training, Language and Culture)" licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/" summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License" canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/malyuga-2017-modern-english-grammar-morphology-syntax/" --- [Elamur Research](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/malyuga-2017-modern-english-grammar-morphology-syntax/) [home](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [papers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/) / [2017](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2017/page/5/) / Modern English grammar: Morphology and syntax (a review) # Modern English grammar: Morphology and syntax (a review) **Authors:** Elena Malyuga · **Year:** 2017 · **Venue:** [Training, Language and Culture 1](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/training-language-and-culture/) ([Training Language and Culture 2017](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/training-language-and-culture/2017/)) · **Publisher:** [Peoples' Friendship University of Russia](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/peoples-friendship-university-of-russia/) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC (journal licence per DOAJ; Training, Language and Culture)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) **Links:** [Publisher's page](https://doi.org/10.29366/2017tlc.1.2.7) · [DOI 10.29366/2017tlc.1.2.7](https://doi.org/10.29366/2017tlc.1.2.7) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2903187255) **Citations:** 0 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14) ## Summary This is a short book review, not an empirical study. Elena Malyuga assesses a university course-book on theoretical English grammar that Olga V. Alexandrova co-wrote with Tatiana A. Komova (Academy, 2013). The book addresses a teaching problem: making theoretical grammar approachable for non-native students of English, who often see it as forbiddingly hard. The review involves no data, experiments, models or computational resources. The book has two parts, one on morphology and one on syntax and discourse. Its stated goal is to connect established facts about grammatical units with how those units behave in authentic speech and writing. The reviewer praises several features: - a clear hierarchical layout, - attention to text categories such as coherence, referentiality and modality, - tolerance for competing interpretations of the same phenomenon, - examples taken from real usage. The verdict is strongly positive and rests on several years of classroom use at Russian universities. For NLP purposes, the book's value is mainly as an inventory of descriptive categories rather than a method. ## Key points - The course-book has 14 thematic sections in two parts. Part 1, Morphology, has 4 topics: definition and place of morphology, categorisation, parts-of-speech classification, and morphology versus syntax, with emphasis on synthetic versus analytical forms. Part 2, Syntax and Discourse, has 10 topics, including minor syntax, syntax and prosody, syntax and punctuation, predication, parenthesis and a pragmatic approach to grammar. - Chapter 6, on the simple sentence, contains a subsection on "syntactic diremes." It is divided into completive, copulative and predicative bonds, the content plane, and prosody/punctuation. - The intended readers are foreign learners rather than native speakers: mainly philology students, but also students of politics, art and humanities, plus novice lecturers and people preparing for candidate exams. The book ends with an alphabetical index. - The review appeared in Training, Language and Culture 1(2), 2017, pp. 102–106, doi 10.29366/2017tlc.1.2.7. The only evidence of effectiveness is that the first edition was used for several years at Russian universities. There is no quantitative evaluation. - The review spells the first author's name both "Alexandrova" and "Aleksandrova." ## Interesting ideas - Grouping word-to-word links into a few bond types (completive, copulative, predicative) gives a coarse layer above fine-grained relations, which is easier to explain to a human. - Treating synthetic and analytical forms as one morphological topic means a multi-word form (an auxiliary plus a participle) can count as a single grammatical form. - Minor syntax and parenthesis get their own topics, and prosody and punctuation are presented as signals of syntactic structure. This flags fragments and inserted remarks as material outside the main clause skeleton. - Grammar is studied alongside text categories such as coherence, referentiality and modality, linking sentence form to text-level meaning. - The book openly accepts that one phenomenon can have several defensible interpretations, rather than forcing a single analysis. ## For Mova How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests: - **I1** (tree): add a derived bond label over UD relations, for example nsubj as predicative, obj/obl as completive and conj as copulative, to give compact, explainable summaries of a parse. - **I2** (tokens): build an analytic-form layer that merges auxiliary chains into one tense/aspect/voice feature bundle on the main verb lemma. - **I3** (frames): use punctuation cues (dashes, paired commas, brackets) to mark parenthetical spans as speaker commentary instead of core frame arguments, and treat elliptical replies as fragments that need frame completion. - **I4** (world): attach modality to states in the world of the text (possible, obligatory, asserted) and link referentiality analysis directly to coreference. - **I5** (learn): when witness parsers disagree on silver data, keep a few ranked alternative analyses with their justifications instead of always collapsing to one. *Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.* ## Institutions - [Peoples' Friendship University of Russia](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/peoples-friendship-university-of-russia/) — University, Moscow, Russia · 2 works 📚 Shelves (2): [🎭 Arts and Humanities](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/arts-and-humanities/) · 9,296 works · [🗣️ Language and Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/arts-and-humanities/language-and-linguistics/) · 9,206 works 🧭 Topics (3): [English](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/english/) · 1,373 works · [📐 Syntax & grammar formalisms](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/syntax-grammar/) · 161 works · [🧩 Morphology](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/morphology/) · 277 works ## Cite Cite as: Elena Malyuga. 2017. Modern English grammar: Morphology and syntax (a review). Training, Language and Culture 1. The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. ```bibtex @inproceedings{malyuga2017modern, title = {{Modern English grammar: Morphology and syntax (a review)}}, author = {Elena Malyuga}, booktitle = {Training, Language and Culture 1}, year = {2017}, doi = {10.29366/2017tlc.1.2.7}, url = {https://doi.org/10.29366/2017tlc.1.2.7} } ``` - [← previous Learning with learner corpora: Using the TLE for native language identification](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/adams-2017-learning-learner-corpora-tle-native/) - [next → Neutral evolution and turnover over centuries of English word popularity](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/ruck-2017-neutral-evolution-turnover-over-centuries/) - [↑ back to papers of 2017](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2017/page/5/) *Updated 24 October 2026*