推荐另一本好语法书：《Collins COBUILD英语语法大全》

此书淘宝店购买链接其实原本这本书的英文名字非常朴素，叫《Collins COBUILD English Grammar》。

Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20110925074633/http://www.lixiaolai.com/archives/5610.html

Another Good Grammar Book: Collins COBUILD English Grammar

> By Li Xiaolai · 2009-02-16 · [Original (web archive)](https://web.archive.org/web/20110925074633/http://www.lixiaolai.com/archives/5610.html) (Chinese)
> Our translation from the Chinese original.

This book's [Taobao shop purchase link](http://item.taobao.com/auction/item_detail-0db2-81411ec65d2c1716bef81fb33e23c1d7.jhtml)

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Actually, this book's English name was originally very plain: Collins COBUILD English Grammar. I don't know why the Commercial Press, when publishing this book, added a word that is really quite unnecessary, "Daquan" (大全, "Complete Compendium")—it's as helpless a feeling as a beautiful woman accidentally getting cheap perfume on herself.

Although few people use this English grammar book, introduced in 1999, it actually is indeed [Translator's note: the original writes 确实 ("indeed"); 却是 ("yet is") is likely meant; it reads either way and is translated as written] a landmark work. The grammar books Chinese readers first came into contact with were mostly by Zhang Daozhen (张道真) and Xu Guozhang (许国璋); these can count as the first generation of grammar books. Only later did Chinese people have the chance to buy the next generation of grammar books, such as the rather classic Longman English Grammar (《朗文英语语法》)—by Louis Alexander, the author of New Concept English (《新概念英语》). And by this English Grammar from Collins, we can already count a third generation. The greatest features of this grammar book are:

- All the example sentences come from a database built on real-world corpora. No longer, like earlier grammar books, full of sentences like "Birds sing."—made up merely to demonstrate grammar rules, sentences that in fact don't exist at all in the real world.
- More attention to usage. This grammar book is "*function-oriented*," not merely the old "rule-oriented" kind. No longer, like past grammar books, "defining the positive from the negative." Past grammar books always unavoidably paid more attention to "you can't do such-and-such"; while in this grammar book readers see more suggestions like this—"If you want to…… then you can……" That is, this grammar book more often defines the positive from the positive—this is an important advance in the field of grammar (it takes a massive corpus as the foundation to develop this way).

It's worth mentioning that Chapter 9 (Text structure) and Chapter 10 (Information structure) of this grammar book are things none of the other grammar books before had clearly dealt with. Past grammar books started from parts of speech and stopped abruptly when they got to sentences, which greatly reduced grammar books' standing in terms of applicability [Translator's note: the original writes 应用型 ("applied type"); 应用性 ("applicability") is meant; translated by the intended sense]. Of course, the other chapters also have a lot of content not dealt with in other grammar books, seemingly trivial but actually very important.

Another feature is the word lists filling every page. What's excerpted below is only [one example](http://www.lixiaolai.com/misc/collins-english-grammar/html/9.20.html):

> [Translator's note: quoted by the author: an excerpt from the Collins COBUILD English Grammar (Chinese edition), not Li Xiaolai's words; the word list is English in the original.]
> The following nouns are used to refer back to ideas, while also expressing an attitude toward those ideas:
>
> > analysis, assessment, assumption, attitude, belief, conclusion, conjecture, concept, deduction, delusion, diagnosis, doctrine, doubt, estimate, evaluation, fear, finding, guess, hope, idea, illusion, inference, insight, interpretation, misinterpretation, notion, opinion, picture, plan, position, reasoning, supposition, theory, thinking, view, viewpoint, vision, wish

Students who have prepared for GRE/GMAT/SAT essays can see at a glance how important this way of organizing is for second-language users.

Of grammar books based on corpora, this seems to be the only one currently available in China. Of English dictionaries based on corpora, there are now many kinds, of which the most useful may be the [Oxford Collocation Dictionary for Students of English](http://www.lixiaolai.com/archives/238.html), and of course there's another, Collins's Collins COBUILD Dictionary on CD-ROM 2006 (now there's a [Lingoes version](http://www.lingoes.cn/zh/dictionary/dict_down.php?id=3F20D028F2130549829DEE2F93AC7E13)). And [the somewhat older versions of the Collins electronic dictionary contain the English original content of the Collins COBUILD English Grammar](http://www.lixiaolai.com/archives/4668.html).

This Collins COBUILD English Grammar introduced by the Commercial Press actually doesn't sell well—only because most readers don't know the merits of this grammar book (perhaps another reason is that the book "seems a bit expensive"—65 yuan RMB). Almost at the same time the Commercial Press also introduced a set of ten grammar books by category, called the COLLINS COBUILD English Grammar Series (《COLLINS COBUILD英语语法系列》), including:

1. Prepositions
2. Word Formation
3. Articles
4. Confusable Words
5. Reporting
6. Homonyms
7. Metaphor
8. Spelling
9. Linking Words
10. Determiners and Quantifiers

Every one of them is a grammar book an English teacher must have (in my personal view), and if students really want to learn English well, spending more time on them is absolutely worth it. In my own impression, Metaphor and Linking Words influenced me the most. Generally speaking, grammar books are for looking things up, but these Collins books I basically read through several times.

Unfortunately, this grammar series sells even worse (I hear the Commercial Press lost money making this set), and it's very hard to buy the complete set in bookshops (the same goes for online bookshops like Dangdang).

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*Further reading*:

- [How to Master English Grammar (1)](http://www.lixiaolai.com/archives/260.html)
- [How to Master English Grammar (2)](http://www.lixiaolai.com/archives/262.html)
- [How to Master English Grammar (3)](http://www.lixiaolai.com/archives/263.html)
- [How to Master English Grammar (4)](http://www.lixiaolai.com/archives/266.html)

Web link: [Aide Ruizhi English & Study-Abroad Bookstore (Taobao shop)](http://shop36699408.taobao.com/) (艾德睿智英语、留学书库（淘宝店）)