Chapter 1 Something About English 1
1.1 A Brief History of English 1
1.2 The Emergence of New Varieties of English 3
1.3 The Expected Dissolution Did Not Come About 5
1.4 English Has Become a Global Language 6
1.5 Why Has English Become the Global Language Today? 7
1.6 As a Global Language English Cuts Both Ways 9
1.7 Problems We Chinese Have While Studying or Using English as a Foreign Language 19
Chapter 2 Abundant Lexical Changes 27
2.1 New Vocabulary 32
2.2 Lexical Changes in Meaning 106
2.3 Substitution 132
2.4 Tendency in Choosing Candid Words(Including the four-letter words)to Call Things by Their Names 178
Chapter 3 Changes in Pronunciation 188
3.1 Changes in Vowels 188
3.2 Changes in Consonants 200
3.3 Opposite Tendency in Shift of Stress 202
3.4 Suprasegmentation 203
Chapter 4 Changes in Spelling 237
4.1 The Discrepancy Between English Pronunciation and Spelling 237
4.2 Spelling Reform in the English Speaking World 241
4.3 Two Schools of Spelling Reformers 242
Chapter 5 Changes in Grammar 247
5.1 Fixed Word Order 249
5.2 Simplification 255
5.3 "More"and"Most"Gaining Ground over"-er"and"-est"in Comparison 263
5.4 Increased Use of Progressive 264
5.5 Decline of Influence of Prescriptive Grammar 264
5.6 Possible Disagreement in Number 265
5.7 "May"(permission)and"Shall"(future)on the Decline 266
5.8 Decline of Subjunctive 267
5.9 Changes in Usages and Collocations 269
5.10 Multiple Negation Is Not Unacceptable 272
Bibliography 274
Glossary 276
Appendix 295