Modern English Grammar

Modern grammar is basically a deliberate contrast with traditional grammar. Its related to, but different from, the difference between prescriptive and descriptive grammar. In the case of English, traditional grammar is ultimately Latin-based, because the first scholars understood Latin grammar and applied its principles to English. This worked fairly well, but only up to a point. Both are Indo-European but Latin is a romance language, while English is Germanic. Application of Latin rules also resulted in strange rules like a preposition magically transforms into an adverb when it has no complement. They also just made mistakes generally.Modern grammar is scientific, so it is based on the corpus analysis. Its not in thrall to Latin grammar, and its not afraid to throw traditional ideas away if there are simpler rules that can be used instead. In the case of our example about prepositions, we can permit one word prepositional phrases in English, and the awkward transformation into adverbs becomes unnecessary.