One danger of modern linguistics is jargon overload. Aarts walks a tightrope brilliantly. He defines every new term the first time it appears. You will learn what a "complement" is versus an "adjunct," but you won't drown in mathematical-looking syntactic trees. The book includes diagrams, but they are clean and minimal.
Unlike prescriptive grammars that focus on "how people should speak," this is a . It documents the actual patterns of modern English using authentic examples from the International Corpus of English (ICE) and contemporary media like the BBC. English Grammar - Bas Aarts oxford modern english grammar by bas aarts