A New English Grammar based on the recommendations of the Joint Committee on Grammatical Terminology, Parts I–III; The Soul of Grammar

What it is about

A school grammar that follows the terminology agreed by the Joint Committee on Grammatical Terminology (1911). Part I gives the parts of speech and the outlines of analysis; Part II gives kinds of pronouns, adjectives and adverbs, and forms with their meanings; Part III covers the structure of sentences and clauses, and their analysis. The Soul of Grammar is a comparative survey of case and category in Latin, Greek, French, German and English. There are no numbers to report: the book is a grammar. The read parts are the outline of analysis of complex sentences (the "sentence-picture": each subordinate clause is written to the right of the clause it depends on, and the subordinating conjunctions stand outside the table), the table-of-analysis rules (a separate column for the indirect object; a case or phrase that qualifies an adjective or adverb goes in that word's column), and the chapter on the adverbial qualification.

Ideas

• I1. Implement the sentence-picture as a deterministic printer for complex sentences: each clause from the UD tree indented under its head, with subordinators on the left. Check it on UD EWT dev by reading the clause nesting back from the printed picture; the round trip must be exact, and two runs must give identical output.
• I2. Encode the table-of-analysis column rules (indirect object in its own column; a phrase qualifying an adjective goes with the adjective; an adverb qualifying the whole predicate goes to a separate "adverbial qualification" column) as a rule table in prag/src/frames.rs, and test on sentences from the book's exercises, which are public domain.
• I3. Build a mapping from the Joint Committee terms (epithet adjective, predicative adjective, adverbial qualification, sentence-adverb) to the abstract annotation labels of 10. Word classes and 22. Phrases: noun, adjective, adverb and prepositional phrases. This is a small table, not a model, and it gives the abstract annotation a historical check.

For Mova

The chapters are 20. Syntax: the Universal Dependencies frame, 21. The simple clause, 22. Phrases: noun, adjective, adverb and prepositional phrases and 24. Coordination and subordination. The code is en/src/parse.rs and the printer would sit next to tools/roundtrip. The first measure is the exact round trip of I1 on EWT dev; the second is the rule-table agreement of I2 on the exercise sentences, reported with a negative control (sentences with the columns shuffled).

Cite

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

@book{sonnenschein1916new,
  title = {{A New English Grammar based on the recommendations of the Joint Committee on Grammatical Terminology, Parts I–III; The Soul of Grammar}},
  author = {Sonnenschein, Edward Adolf},
  year = {1916},
  url = {https://archive.org/details/newenglishgramma00sonnuoft}
}

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