Grammar by Michael Swan
Grammar theory has probably never been described in such a witty and fascinating way as did Michael Swan, the author of a vast number of textbooks and manuals on English grammar. This book, according to the author, is not so much an analysis of the grammatical rules of English as an attempt to answer questions about the essence of science itself, to provide a broad and objective view of the subject as a whole. This approach turns a rather complex learning process into a fascinating reading.
Besides reasoning about the nature of grammatical teaching, the author writes about more specific things, such as parts of speech and sentence structure, grammatical categories, illustrating them with examples from different languages.
Swan devotes a whole chapter to the practical side of grammar, how the use of certain grammatical constructions depends on the context and communicative situation, what is the difference between language used in oral and written speech, in formal and informal communication. Try yourself: which of the two expressions below is from oral and which is from written speech? What grammatical characteristics show it?
2) “Peter, you know, he didn’t get a degree, and then he wouldn’t do anything about getting a job, and of course, his parents, they got really worried.”