The New English Grammar
As we all know, the traditional grammar we learned in senior high school has some differences with the new grammar we are learning in the college. Therefore, I would like to make a summary about what’s new in new English grammar.
Firstly,the description and explanation of the grammar rules in the traditional grammar teaching are limited to the sentence level. The problems involved and discussed in grammar teaching is about words and syntactic problems, the focus of teachers and learners is part of speech in the sentence, form and word order and syntactic category in the sentence function, different patterns of grammar. Butthe new English structure has five hierarchies with sentence, clause, phrase, word and morpheme. The analytic hierarchy process in new English grammar meansthe sentence segmentation by one layer segmentationto its smallest part– morpheme. Meanwhile, there are two approaches to analyze sentence in new English grammar. One predicate verb, object, complement, adverbial, and with the subject draws subject, verb, object, complementand adverbial modifier five main clause constituents represented by phrase. Another is to analyze the predicate as operator and predication.
Secondly, determiner has become a new word category in new English
grammar. Determiner is parts of speech with some limited roles such as specific reference, generic reference definite quantity and indefinite quantity to the center noun in the noun phrases. It includes articles, pronouns, numerals, and quantifiers. And new grammar has a rule that determiner and noun phrase central word have some fixed collocation; if before a noun with two or more than two determiners, determiner and determiner also have some fixed collocation.
Thirdly, traditional grammar has three tenses and four aspects, including present, past and future tense, simple, continuous, perfect and perfect continuous aspects. However, in order to distinguish the concept of tense and aspect,the new English grammar considers that there are only two tenses and two aspects, including simple present tense and simple past tense, progressive aspect and perfective aspect. Obviously, there is no future tense in the new grammar, but it doesn’t mean English is not able to express the future time. On the contrary, there are various kinds of expression of future time in new grammar, such as will or shall linking with infinitive, be going to linking with infinitive, be linking with –ing, be to linking with infinitive and so on.
Fourthly, subjunctive mood is a form of a verb that expresses the meaning of the hypothesis and the other non - factual meaning in traditional
