This book shows how grammar helps people communicate and looks at the ways grammar and meaning interrelate. The author starts from the notion that a speaker codes a meaning into grammatical forms which the listener is then able to recover: each word, he shows, has its own meaning and each bit of grammar its own function, their combinations creating and limiting the possibilities for different words. He uncovers a rationale for the varying grammatical properties of different words and in the process explains many facts about English - such as why we can say I wish to go, I wish that he would go, and I want to go but not I want that he would go. The first part of the book reviews the main points of English syntax and discusses English verbs in terms of their semantic types including those of Motion, Giving, Speaking, Liking, and Trying. In the second part Professor Dixon looks at eight grammatical topics, including complement clauses, transitivity and causatives, passives, and the promotion of a non-subject to subject, as in Dictionaries sell well. This is the updated and revised edition of A New Approach to English Grammar on Semantic Principles.It includes new chapters on tense and aspect, nominalizations and possession, and adverbs and negation, and contains a new discussion of comparative forms of adjectives. It also explains recent changes in English grammar, including how they has replaced the tabooed he as a pronoun referring to either gender, as in When a student reads this book, they will learn a lot about English grammar in a most enjoyable manner.

迪格森（R.M.W. Dixon）先後任澳大利亞國立大學語言學係係主任、拉籌伯大學語言類型學中心主任，現任詹姆斯·庫剋大學（James Cook University）榮譽教授。

迪格森是國際知名的語言類型學傢，以研究澳大利亞土著語以及拉丁美洲亞馬遜河流域的語言而聞名，對語言理論研究有獨到的貢獻。特彆值得稱道的是他對名詞的分類，以及對類彆詞、使動結構、及物性，以及詞的性質等專題研究。