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I am grateful to all the people who helped me with the preparation of this third edition of Practical English Usage. A large number of teachers in different countries were kind enough to respond to an enquiry asking how they felt the work could be improved; many others wrote to me with suggestions for improvements to particular entries. These people's feedback was extremely helpful, and I am very much in their debt. I am also greatly indebted to David Baker, whose comments and suggestions added very significantly to the accuracy and clarity of the material. I must also reacknowledge my debt to Jonathan Blundell, Norman Coe, Michio Kawakami, Michael Macfarlane, Nigel Middlemiss, the late Keith Mitchell, H A Swan, Robert Turner, Catherine Walter, Gareth Watkins, and the many other consultants and correspondents whose help and advice with the preparation of earlier editions continue as an important contribution to this one.
Any pedagogic grammarian owes an enormous debt to the academic linguists on whose research he or she is parasitic. There is not enough space to mention all the scholars of the last hundred years or so on whose work I have drawn directly or indirectly, even if I had a complete record of my borrowings. But I must at least pay homage to two monumental reference works of the present generation: the Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, by Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech and Svartvik (Longman 1985), and the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, by Huddleston, Pullum and others (Cambridge University Press 2002). Their authoritative accounts of the facts of English structure and usage constitute an essential source of information for anyone writing pedagogic grammar materials today.
Finally, it is with particular pleasure that I express my gratitude, once again, to the editorial, design and production team at Oxford University Press, whose professional expertise is matched only by their concern to make an author's task as trouble-free as possible.