An Advanced English Grammar with Exercises

What it is about

A university-level grammar with numbered paragraphs and exercises. Part One covers the parts of speech in the sentence, the phrase and the clause (pp. 1–24). Part Two covers inflection and syntax, including the subordinate clauses as nouns, adjectives and adverbs and the meanings of subordinate clauses (pp. 25–182). Part Three is the analysis of sentences: the structure of sentences, the analysis of simple sentences (§ 458 onward), of complex and compound sentences, and a chapter on elliptical sentences. The method for a simple sentence is to split it into the complete subject and the complete predicate, then name the simple subject and predicate with their modifiers and complement. The text is a clean Project Gutenberg text, so its paragraph numbers can be cited. The book gives no numerical results; it is a grammar with exercises. Only the table of contents, the preface, the chapter on the structure of sentences and the opening of the analysis of simple sentences were read.

Ideas

• I1. Turn the book's order of analysis (complete subject, complete predicate, simple subject with modifiers, predicate with complement) into a printer for UD trees in en/src/parse.rs: the complete subject is the nsubj subtree, the complete predicate is the root subtree. Measure the match with EWT dev trees, run twice, and report the rate with date.
• I2. Chapter X treats clauses as nouns, adjectives and adverbs. Build a rule table from clause function to UD relation (ccomp, acl, advcl, csubj), tested on held-out EWT sentences, with a negative control where the head word is replaced by a random one.
• I3. Chapter VIII, elliptical sentences, is listed in the contents but was not read here. Read it before deciding; if it fits, the ellipsis rules could go into prag as an explicit gap-filler with a log of each filled slot.

For Mova

The chapters are 20. Syntax: the Universal Dependencies frame, 21. The simple clause, 24. Coordination and subordination and 29. Ellipsis, word order and information structure. The code is en/src/parse.rs, tools/roundtrip and prag/src/frames.rs. The measure is the agreement of I1 and I2 on EWT dev, plus the held-out check against the negative control.

Cite

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

@book{kittredge1913advanced,
  title = {{An Advanced English Grammar with Exercises}},
  author = {Kittredge, George Lyman and Farley, Frank Edgar},
  year = {1913},
  url = {https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/45814}
}

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