A Grammar of Late Modern English

Summary

A five-volume descriptive grammar of literary English of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, written by a Dutch teacher for Continental students. Every claim is supported by many sourced quotations from writers such as Dickens, Thackeray and Trollope and from newspapers, often with cross-references to Sweet, Jespersen, Mätzner and the OED. The method is to show usage with its fluctuations rather than to prescribe: what is ordinary, colloquial, vulgar or archaic, and where "usage is divided". It draws fine distinctions between functions of the same word: conjoint and absolute possessives (my/mine), individual and classifying genitives, partial and full conversion of adjectives into nouns, reflexive and emphatic -self. It gives much attention to word order, notional agreement with collective nouns, the choice between 's and of, who/which/that, and the use and omission of the article. Its categories are close to modern ones (relative "that" as a pronoun, "one" as a prop-word), so they map well onto Universal Dependencies.

How Mova uses it

• One of the two largest sources of the rule seeds: about 60 files, mostly in en/seeds/nominal/ and en/seeds/errors/, and about 88 executable rules of the grammar expert system (en/src/expert.rs) name it.
• Noun-phrase rules: articles and "a/an" by sound, predeterminers, adjective before article ("so harsh an answer"), ordinals vs numerals, demonstrative number, collective and mass nouns, absolute and double genitives, prop-word "one", relative "that", reflexive agreement, "a-" adjectives (afraid, asleep) not used attributively (en/seeds/nominal/).
• Error rules: determiner-noun number mismatch, singular subject with plural verb, nominative case of subject pronouns (en/seeds/errors/determiner-noun-number.md, singular-subject-plural-verb.md, subject-pronoun-case.md).
• Verb lexicon: verbs taking a gerund rather than a "to"-infinitive object and raising/control verbs (en/seeds/lexicon/verb-gerund-object.md, verb-infinitive-object.md).

Effectiveness in Mova

A core reference for noun-phrase and agreement rules; 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{poutsma1904grammar,
  title = {{A Grammar of Late Modern English}},
  author = {Poutsma, Hendrik},
  year = {1904},
  url = {https://archive.org/details/grammaroflatemod01poutuoft}
}

References

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

1. GRAMMARS AND GRAMMATICAL TREATISES CONSULTED. E A. Gramma r -, Alacmillan & Co , lf-83. o Abbot, A Shakespearean A. Akerlund, The History of the Definite Tenses in English. Cambridge. Heffer & Sons, 1911. find
2. H. Alford, The Queen's Englis h\ George Bell & sons, 1889. find
3. A Bain, A Higher English Grammar-, Longmans & Co.. 1879. , A Companion to the Higher English G r a tii m a r-', Longmans, Green & Co., 1877. E. BoRST, Die Gradadverbien im En g Use hen, Heidelberg, Carl Winters Universitatsbiichhandlung, 1£02 H. Bradley, The Making of English, Macmillan & Co., 1904. G. O. CuRME, A Grammar of the German Language-, New York, the Macmillan Company, 1922. M. Deutschbein, System der tieuenglischen Syntax, Cothen, Otto Schuize, 1917. DuBisLAW, Beitriige zur historischen Syntax des Englischen. Wissenschaftliche Beilage zuin Jahresbericht der Oberrealschule II 2u Charlotten-burg, 1909. J. Earle, The Philology of the English T o n g u e\ Oxford, at the Clarendon Press, 1887. EiLERT Ekwall, On the Origin and History of the Unchanged Plural in English, Lund. find
4. C W. K. Gieerup; Leipzig, Otto Harrassovvitz, 1912. E EiNENKEL, S t r e i f z ii g e d u r c h die m i 1 1 e 1 e n g 1 i s c h e Syntax, Miinster i. W., Verlag von Heinrich Schciningh, 1887. , Das englische 1 n d e f i n i t u m, Halle a. d. S., Verlag von A\a\ Niemeyer, 1903. find

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