A Grammar of the English Language, in a Series of Letters

What it is about

A grammar written as a series of letters addressed to a young reader (James), meant for self-study by schoolchildren, young people and soldiers. The introduction gives the reasons for learning grammar and the method: parts of speech first, then syntax, with the rules explained by example. Letter XVII ("Syntax, as relating to pronouns") is the most specific: it argues that a personal pronoun must relate clearly to its nominative, so that it is not left to refer to some other word, and it calls the small pronoun words the ones where "great errors in point of meaning" arise. The letters use political writing as examples of confused reference. There are no numerical results; the text is a teaching text.

Ideas

• I1. Make an ambiguous-reference test from the Letter XVII point: sentences with two possible antecedents for "he", "she" or "it", each with the gold antecedent. Run coref/src/sieve.rs on them and report precision per pronoun type.
• I2. Build a rule for pronoun-antecedent distance: when a pronoun has no antecedent in its own clause and the nearest candidate is more than one clause away, flag the pronoun as unclear and say why. The flag is a reason, not a fix.
• I3. Use a negative control: swap the antecedent sentence with an unrelated one, keep the pronoun, and check that the resolver no longer links it to the original noun.

For Mova

The chapters are 35. Reference and coreference and 12. Pronouns, determiners and numerals. The code is coref/src/sieve.rs, coref/src/mention.rs and the evaluation in coref/src/eval.rs. Measure: pronoun resolution accuracy on a hand-written set of ambiguous sentences with gold antecedents, run twice for identical results. The negative control is the shuffled-antecedent set, which must score lower than the gold set.

Cite

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

@book{cobbett1818grammar,
  title = {{A Grammar of the English Language, in a Series of Letters}},
  author = {Cobbett, William},
  year = {1818},
  url = {https://archive.org/details/grammarofenglish00cobbiala}
}

This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/cobbett-1818-grammar-english-language-series/