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If you are looking for a quick fix for comma splices, buy a workbook. But if you want to truly understand the engine of the English language—to see the cogs and levers of phrases, clauses, and mood—you need the . It is an investment in linguistic literacy that will pay dividends every time you write, speak, or analyze the English language for years to come.
To understand the value of Oxford Modern English Grammar , one must first understand its author. Bas Aarts is a Professor of English Linguistics at University College London (UCL) and the Director of the Survey of English Usage, a research unit founded by the legendary Randolph Quirk. Aarts is not a prescriptive schoolteacher worried about split infinitives; he is a leading descriptive linguist. oxford modern english grammar by bas aarts
She didn’t correct his sentence. She no longer needed to. Bas Aarts hadn’t given her a rulebook. He had given her a mirror—and in it, language lived, breathed, and occasionally split an infinitive with perfect grace. If you are looking for a quick fix
She opened the wine first, then the book. “Descriptive, not prescriptive,” she murmured, reading the preface. “Grammar as it is , not as it should be.” She found this both liberating and deeply unsettling. To understand the value of Oxford Modern English
One danger of modern linguistics is jargon overload. Aarts walks a tightrope brilliantly. He defines every new term the first time it appears. You will learn what a "complement" is versus an "adjunct," but you won't drown in mathematical-looking syntactic trees. The book includes diagrams, but they are clean and minimal.
Oxford Modern English Grammar abandons this antiquated visual style in favor of based on modern phrase structure grammar. For the uninitiated, this might seem daunting. However, Aarts is a master pedagogue. He introduces these diagrams gently, using them to visually represent the hierarchy of language.
