English Grammar, Adapted to the Different Classes of Learners, with an Appendix

What it is about

The most widely used prescriptive school grammar of the nineteenth century. It has four parts: orthography, etymology, syntax and prosody. The syntax part defines a simple sentence as one with a single finite verb and a compound sentence as two or more joined by a connective, then gives "rules of syntax" with examples of correct and faulty construction, and a note on the preposition separated from its relative ("Whom wilt thou give it to?"), which the book treats as a point of usage. The rules are written as agreement and government statements, and the observations after them name errors to avoid. The book has no measurements; its value for us is as a fixed list of claimed rules and of errors that were taught as errors.

Ideas

• I1. Turn each "rule of syntax" with its example pair (the form the book condemns and the form it prefers) into a test for the parser: the condemned sentence should get a flag, the preferred one should not. Report which rules the parser can check at all.
• I2. Use the prescriptive rules as a register marker, not as truth: a rule that is still disputed (for example the "Whom" rule) gets a note in 37. Register and variation, and the tagger keeps the form without a penalty.
• I3. Use the clause definitions of the syntax part (simple, compound, the three kinds of simple sentence) as a check on the clause-type labeller, the same test as the one for Nesfield.

For Mova

The chapters are 26. Questions (for "Whom wilt thou" and preposition stranding), 24. Coordination and subordination and 37. Register and variation. The code is en/src/parse.rs for the flag and tools/treeagree check for gate-style checks. Measure: the flag rate on the faulty and correct example sets, run twice, with the preferred sentences as the negative control: their flag rate must be near zero, or the rule is a plain "always yes".

Cite

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

@book{murray1795english,
  title = {{English Grammar, Adapted to the Different Classes of Learners, with an Appendix}},
  author = {Murray, Lindley},
  year = {1795},
  url = {https://archive.org/details/englishgrammarad00murrrich}
}

This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/murray-1795-english-grammar-adapted-different/