These posts began as attempts to create a systematic map of the English language. I had come to realise that my understanding of the language was not as clear as it should be.

This is particularly a problem when it comes to understanding foreign languages. Trying to learn a second language based on a faulty understanding of grammatical structure will inevitably lead to problems. Language doesn’t translate simply at the level of semantics, that is, the meaning and use of words. An understanding of the equivalent syntactic and morphological structure is also required.

In the course of putting these notes together, I realised that the complexity of the English language is achieved within a relatively simple framework. The scale of the vocabulary and the flexibility of statement construction disguises an underlying systematicity. The complexity is built from very few components deployed in a systematic fashion.

With that in mind, as an additional objective, I have tried to describe the simplest possible specification for the syntax of the English language that is applicable to every possible well-formed statement.

Jonathan Chapman