An essential reference for students and teachers, The Grammar Dictionary covers over 250 terms using examples drawn from real-life texts that range from the works of Shakespeare, Mark Twain and Emily Dickinson to current works from Time magazine and The Scientist. It gives detailed and accessible information on familiar terms such as "noun," "subject" and "predicate;" and also on more obscure but equally important ones such as "absolute construction," "aspect" and "modality." Terms are drawn from traditional grammar and the most recent work in universal grammar. The illustrative examples come from over 100 real-life texts that are at the heart of the Dictionary, because they serve to illustrate the points of grammar. The author does this to get away from the sort of trivial examples common to most grammar texts ("The fox chased the hare") and to show that real people in the real world use many complex grammar features. 196 pages.