A Higher English Grammar, with A Companion to the Higher English Grammar

What it is about

A school grammar by a logician and psychologist, in two parts. The Higher English Grammar is organised in three strands for etymology: classes of words, inflexion and derivation. Syntax is grouped under three heads: concord, government, and order of words. The preface says the book explains the exact meaning of frequent words (pronouns, articles, distributive adjectives, prepositions, conjunctions) as well as their form. The analysis of sentences is set out in full: simple, complex and compound sentences, with contracted and elliptical sentences treated as a separate section (sections 63 to 78). The Companion is a discussion of contested rules, for example the classes of nouns, with abstract nouns that turn into common nouns in the plural. The book gives examples and classifications, not measurements.

Ideas

• I1. Use the three syntactic heads (concord, government, order) as the three checks of the generator in en/src/lin.rs: for each generated sentence, test subject-verb number, case of pronouns after prepositions, and word order, and report the failures per head.
• I2. Build a list of elliptical patterns from sections 63 to 78 (a verb left out after an auxiliary, a noun left out after an adjective) and let tools/roundtrip restore the omitted word, then measure how often the restored tree equals the gold tree.
• I3. Use the Companion's rule about abstract nouns used as common nouns (plural or "a/an") as a feature for en/src/morph.rs: a noun in the plural with an article is counted as common, and the rule is tested on EWT.

For Mova

The chapters are 22. Phrases: noun, adjective, adverb and prepositional phrases (the three heads), 29. Ellipsis, word order and information structure (the contracted and elliptical sentences) and 11. Nouns (the abstract-to-common shift). The code is en/src/lin.rs, tools/roundtrip and en/src/morph.rs. Measure: the failure count per head on a fixed generated set, run twice, plus a negative control in which the word order is shuffled, which must fail more often.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@book{bain1874higher,
  title = {{A Higher English Grammar, with A Companion to the Higher English Grammar}},
  author = {Bain, Alexander},
  year = {1874},
  url = {https://archive.org/details/higherenglishgra00bainrich}
}

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