From the time when we started collaborating as a team in the 1960s, we envisaged not a grammar but a series of grammars. In 1972, there appeared the first volume in this series, A Grammar of Contemporary English (GCE). This was followed soon afterwards by two shorter works, A Communicative Grammar of English (CGE) and A University Grammar of English (UGE, published in the United States with the title A Concise Grammar of Contemporary English). These two were in part an abridgment of GCE, but, what is more significant is that they were deliberately different both from the parent book and from each other. This is particularly obvious in the case of CGE, which looks at the whole grammar of the language from a semantic and communicative viewpoint. It is less obviously true of UGE, which follows i the chapter divisions and in most cases the chapter titles of GCE, though in fact the abridgment was accompanied by a good deal of fresh thinking and radical revision.