Historical Outlines of English Syntax

What it is about

The book asks why English sentence structure changed over time, and what a historical syntax should explain. The introduction sets out the object of syntax, its division into parts, and its close ties to phonetics and accidence. It argues that syntax has no strict proportion or unity in early English, and that psychology and popular speech must be consulted alongside history. The main body is numbered in short sections (for example on abstract replacing concrete combinations, on anacoluthon, on ellipsis, and on plural nouns with singular predicates). Each claim is illustrated with dated quotations from Old English to Shakespeare's histories. The argument is qualitative: the sections I read give examples and explanations, not counts.

Ideas

• I1. Use the dated quotations as a test set for word order. Extract the patterns Kellner cites (verb-final clauses, pronoun objects before verbs), parse them, and check whether en/src/lin.rs with its UD-trained tables gives the attested order. Report the failures by century, so the misses are visible.
• I2. Treat the ellipsis sections as a negative-control source: sentences with a missing predicate that the paper says are normal in older English. Check that the world reader does not invent a fact for them.
• I3. Turn the "abstract for concrete" shift (§ 20) into a small lexicon of constructions with a date range, so that the early-modern mode can say which reading it used and why.

For Mova

The chapters are 8. Word order and phrase structure and 29. Ellipsis, word order and information structure. The code is en/src/lin.rs (linearization), en/src/emode.rs (closed table of Early Modern forms), and prag for the ellipsis reading. The measure: the share of cited patterns that lin.rs orders correctly, by century, run twice for determinism.

Cite

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

@book{kellner1892historical,
  title = {{Historical Outlines of English Syntax}},
  author = {Kellner, Leon},
  year = {1892},
  url = {https://archive.org/details/historicaloutlin00kelluoft}
}

References

2 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

1. Ed. Madden, 1847. Text A ab. 1205. Text B. ab. 1275. Legendary. Early English Verse Lives of Saints (earliest version) Ed. C. Horstmann. find
2. E.E.T.S. 1887. A.D. 1290. Layamon. Ed. O. H. Sommer. Malory, Morte Darthur. Manning, see Robert de Brunne. find

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