Editing English grammar (section)

==Overview==
This article describes a generalized, present-day [[Standard English]] – forms of speech and writing used in public discourse, including broadcasting, education, entertainment, government, and news, over a range of [[Register (sociolinguistics)|registers]], from formal to informal. Divergences from the [[grammar]] described here occur in some historical, social, cultural, and regional [[List of dialects of the English language|varieties]] of English, although these are minor compared to the differences in [[English phonology|pronunciation]] and [[lexicon|vocabulary]].

[[Modern English]] has largely abandoned the [[inflectional]] [[grammatical case|case system]] of [[Indo-European]] in favor of [[analytic language|analytic]] constructions. The [[personal pronoun]]s retain morphological case more strongly than any other word class (a remnant of the more extensive Germanic case system of Old English). For other pronouns, and all nouns, adjectives, and articles, grammatical function is indicated only by [[word order]], by [[English prepositions|prepositions]], and by the "[[Saxon genitive]] or [[English possessive]]" (''-'s'').<ref name="Huddleston phrasal genitive">{{Cite book|quote=We conclude that both head and phrasal genitives involve case inflection. With head genitives it is always a noun that inflects, while the phrasal genitive can apply to words of most classes. |pages=479–481|chapter= Nouns and noun phrases |last1=Payne|first1= John |last2=Huddleston |first2= Rodney |author-link2=Rodney Huddleston |editor1-last=Huddleston |editor1-first=Rodney |editor1-link=Rodney Huddleston |editor2-last= Pullum |editor2-first= Geoffrey |editor2-link=Geoffrey Pullum |title=The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language |year=2002 |publisher=Cambridge University Press |location=Cambridge; New York |isbn=0-521-43146-8}}</ref>