Though problems of style as such are outside the scope of this book, some remarks concerning the stylistic value of grammatical categories and grammatical elements may prove appropriate to a thorough study of English grammatical structure. From the stylistic viewpoint, it should first of all be noted that some grammatical categories and phenomena are neutral while others are not. To be more explicit, this means that some grammatical phenomena may appear in any sort of speech, whether oral or written, whether solemn or vulgar, etc., without in any way conflicting with the stylistic colouring of the text, whatever it may happen to be. Other grammatical phenomena, on the other hand, have a distinct stylistic colouring and will produce an effect of inappropriateness if applied outside their stylistic sphere. To illustrate this general statement, we might say that the past indefinite tense is devoid of any stylistic colouring, it is stylistically neutral and it appears both in a solemn hymn and in a street song, and indeed in any kind of text without any exception whatsoever. On the other hand, the so-called absolute construction, as in the sentence She picked up a large split-oak basket and started down, the back stairs, each step jouncing her head until her spine seemed to be trying to crash through the top of her skull (M. MITCHELL) has a distinctly literary flavour. Constructions of this kind are not used in colloquial speech and if, say, an author were to put a construction of this kind into the mouth of a character in a comedy of modern English life, it would sound singularly inappropriate. To take a different example: the forms of the personal pronouns him, her, us, them, used in the function of a predicative after the subject it and the link verb is, or was, have a very distinct low colloquial tinge, and they would be completely inappropriate in a literary, still more so in a solemn context. A sentence like It was them that did it has that peculiar stylistic colouring which creates a certain atmosphere, even if nothing preceded that sentence (for example, if it were the opening sentence of some short story). All this has to be reckoned with in characterising the grammatical resources of the Modern English language.We will now give a brief survey of the grammatical categories and the grammatical phenomena which bear (or tend to bear) some kind of stylistic colouring or other, first those of morphology, then those of syntax.