Higher Lessons in English (1877/1886) and Graded Lessons in English (1877)

Summary

Two American school textbooks that introduced the Reed–Kellogg sentence diagram, the standard way of parsing sentences in American schools for more than a century. The junior course has 97 lessons, the senior one 168. Both move from the sentence down to the word: subject and predicate first, then modifiers, prepositional phrases and compound members, then three kinds of complement (direct object, predicate attribute after "be/become", and objective complement as in "made Victoria queen"). Later lessons treat participles and infinitives, independent elements (address, absolute phrases, expletive "there"), word order and inversion, ellipsis, and complex and compound sentences, followed by the parts of speech with their forms, including a "by"-agent test for the passive. Each lesson has analysis and parsing exercises, and diagrams are reproduced in text form, so the books amount to a small school-style treebank.

How Mova uses it

• Cited in about 30 seeds in en/seeds/verbal/ and en/seeds/lexicon/ (agreement with compound, indefinite and third-person subjects, absolute constructions, copula-like verbs, retained objects in the passive, objective complements, existential "there", auxiliary heads, ellipsis and gapping).
• Its clause analyses are used to decide how such constructions should look as Universal Dependencies trees (which word is the head, what relation the element gets), e.g. the absolute phrase in en/seeds/verbal/absolute-construction.md.
• Named directly in one executable rule, parataxis-has-subject (Lesson 57, coordinated predicates; en/seeds/verbal/finite-verb-subject.md).

Effectiveness in Mova

Mostly background for how constructions are analysed, with one rule citing it directly; not measured separately.

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Cite

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

@book{reed1877higher,
  title = {{Higher Lessons in English (1877/1886) and Graded Lessons in English (1877)}},
  author = {Reed, Alonzo and Kellogg, Brainerd},
  year = {1877},
  url = {https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7188}
}

This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/reed-1877-higher-lessons-english/