This book is an attempt to contribute to the contrastive study of the
syntax of English and Dutch. Although it is not the first contrastive
grammar of the two languages to be published in Holland, it is
undoubtedly the most comprehen- sive. In writing A Contrastive Grammar
of English and Dutch (henceforth CGED), we have been fortunate in having
at our disposal the two most ex- haustive descriptions of English and
Dutch published to date: A Comprehen- sive Grammar of the English
Language (CGEL), by Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech and
Jan Svartvik, which appeared in 1985, and the Algemene Nederlandse
Spraakkunst (ANS), by G. Geerts, W. Haeseryn, J. de Rooij and M. e. van
den Toorn, published in 1984. Both grammars are based on a traditional
descriptive framework; this also holds true for CGED. CGED consists of
two parts. Part One ('A Concise English Grammar') pro- vides an overview
of the main points of English syntax. It introduces students to the
concepts and terminology they require in order to be able to compare the
syntactic structures of English and Dutch. Part One consists of two
chap- ters. In Chapter 1 the questions 'What is grammar?' and 'What is
contrastive grammar?' are dealt with briefly.