Bas Aarts - English Grammar
On this Substack I will post on English grammar in general, but with a special focus on sentence analysis (parsing). It is intended for those who know some grammar already. Nerdy, esoteric and niche? Yep.
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English Grammar Day 2026
With Charlotte Brewer and Jonnie Robinson I’m one of the co-organisers of the annual English Grammar Day.
This year it will take place on Monday 29 June 2026 at the British Library (Pigott Theatre, Knowledge Centre, British Library, London...
Tricky relative clauses (2)
Grammars of English make a well-known distinction between restrictive relative clauses and non-restrictive relative clauses, exemplified here:
The comments [that he made on social media] are unacceptable.
The Pope, [who lives in a modest...
"I would have had to have flown to London"
In an earlier post I discussed the headline below:
I talked about how speakers nowadays often drop the past perfect (‘If Andy Burnham had been allowed…’) in favour of a simple past tense, as in the headline.
Today there was a story in the...
The past perfect in counterfactual if-clauses
Take a look at this headline on the BBC News website today:
Do you notice anything about it?
I’ve heard older generations say this kind of construction too. Here’s an old clip of Joe Biden at the 2022 annual Correspondents’ Dinner:
Biden...
Mules of meaning: complex noun phrases
A noun phrase is defined as a syntactic unit with a noun as its Head, which may have dependents. Recall that ‘Head’ is a grammatical function.
The simplest noun phrases consist of only one word. Here are some examples:
[NP Sunshine] makes...
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Authors
The writers behind this newsletter.
Professor of English Linguistics at University College London (UCL) https://profiles.ucl.ac.uk/4300-bas-aarts
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