An English Grammar: Methodical, Analytical, and Historical

Summary

The English translation of Mätzner's large German grammar of English, historical and descriptive in approach: each phenomenon is traced from Anglo-Saxon through Middle English to the modern language and illustrated with many quotations from Chaucer and Shakespeare to Byron, Macaulay and Dickens. Mätzner records variants rather than prescribing, and sometimes argues directly against narrow rules of earlier grammarians, for example on comparison of adjectives. This makes it strong as an inventory of forms: exceptional plurals (-ves, -oes/-os, foreign plurals, plurals of compounds), plural-only nouns, strong verbs by class with obsolete forms marked, irregular weak verbs, comparison and -most forms, pronouns, and long lists of suffixes and prefixes. Its limits are nineteenth-century and mainly literary usage with many archaisms, no statistics, and little on pronunciation.

How Mova uses it

• Cited in about 24 seeds in en/seeds/morph/ (comparison, adjectives used as nouns, -ly and flat adverbs, articles, genitive -s, plurals, pronouns, word-formation suffixes, spelling changes) and named in 6 executable rules of the grammar expert system (en/src/expert.rs).
• Its spelling examples ("bigger, hotter", "politer, abler, truer", "happier" vs "gayer") support lemma checks for consonant doubling, y-to-i and silent -e on verbs, nouns and adjectives (e.g. doubling-adj-lemma, y-to-i-noun-lemma, y-to-i-adj-lemma).
• Used as cross-evidence next to Sweet, Whitney and Kruisinga rather than as a sole source.

Effectiveness in Mova

A supporting reference for morphology seeds; its own contribution is not measured separately. The rule engine as a whole (rules from all sources together) has been measured, not per book: on UD EWT train only 16 of 213 error-level rules fire at all, and almost all of their hits are errors in EWT itself; on a 292-sentence Opus annotation, violations of error-level rules were real errors in 36 of 36 cases, but covered only 6.4% of the erroneous tokens (warn-level rules another 3.9%). In short: precise, low recall, useful as hints rather than full control.

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Cite

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

@book{matzner1874english,
  title = {{An English Grammar: Methodical, Analytical, and Historical}},
  author = {Mätzner, Eduard},
  year = {1874},
  url = {https://archive.org/details/englishgrammarme01maetuoft}
}

References

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

1. the son of a house- painter, was born on the 25th of May 1805 at Rostock in Mecklenburg. He was a pupil at the gymnasium, or grammar school, of Greifswald in Prussian Pomerania, where he began his career as an author by the publication, in 1822, of a romantic drama in five acts, called Hermann and Thusnelda. Philology and theology were the subjects of his studies, both at Greifswald, and afterwards at Heidelberg, but philosophy, or thought in the most elevated and abstract forms of its activity, and philology, or the study of the vehicle of thought in its manifold manifestations, presented to his vigorous and enquiring mind so many more attractions than the theology which had been his destined career that the latter was gradually abandoned. In 1830 he became a tutor at Yverdun in French Switzerland, but quitted that post the following year to become the master of a French gymnasium at Berlin, which, after about another year, he quitted for a gymnasium at Bromberg in Posen. He was constrained by ill-health to give up this appointment in 1834, and remained in private life till 1838, when he accepted the post of director, or head-master, of a collegiate establishment at Berlin for the higher education of girls, which he still fills. The duties of his appointment leave him leisure for the prosecution of his favourite studies and pursuits. His wife Ida, was sister of Dr. Gustav Eberty, now Stadtgerichtsrath, or one of the members of the central court of justice for Berlin, and also one of the members for Berlin in the Prussian House of Representatives. She died in 1870. find
2. His published works are as follows : — A Latin Essay upon the Homeric Zeus, 1834. Licurgi Oratio in Leocatem. find
3. Berlin, 1836. Aristophanis Orationes XV. find
4. VII Berlin, 1838. Aphorismen aus Theodor Parow's Nachlass. find
5. Berlin, 1837. Dinarchi Orationes III. find
6. Berlin, 1842. Ueber volksthiimliche Getranke in cultur-historischer Bezie-hung, in den Verhandlungen der poly tech nischen Gesellschaft. find
7. Berlin, 1857. Syntax der Neufranzosischen Sprache. find
8. Theil II. 1845. Ueber das Geschworengericht und das Schuldwesen ; in der Zeitschrift fiir volksthiimliches Becht und nationale Gesetzgebung, von Gustav Eberty. find
9. Halle, 1844. Franzosische Grammatik, mit besonderer Beriicksichtigung cles Lateinischen. find
10. Berlin, 1856. Altfranzosische Lieder, berichtigt und erlautert, nebst Glossar. find
11. Berlin, 1853. Vorwort zu : Aus Stadler's Nachlass. find
12. Berlin, 1865. Eiiglische Grammatik. Theil I. I860. . Theil II. find

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