The Comparative Analysis of the Grammatical Units Used in School Grammar and in Modern Grammar

This paper is intended to analyze and compare the grammatical units used in school grammar and in modern grammar. To this end, this paper intvestigates the 5 principal forms of predicates by Onion(1907) and Hosoe(1917), the 25 verb patterns by Honby(1957) and the grammatical information used in Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary(1948) and in Collins Cobuild Advanced Learner’s English Dictionary(1987), and researches the use of subcategorization and thematic relations as argument structures. The grammatical units used in school grammar are compared with those in modern grammar. The grammatical units used in school grammar are complex, inconsistent, and even confused when compared with those of modern grammar. However, school grammar is still considered helpful for English learners to understand and learn basic sentence patterns and basic words.