Essentials of English Grammar.pdf

Essentials of English Grammar

Otto Jespersen

London

First published March 1933 by George Allan & Unwin Ltd

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Preface

THE appearance of this book is due to urgent appeals from some English friends (among

them Professors W.E.Collinson, G.C.Moore Smith, and R.A.Williams), who asked me to

bring out a one-volume grammar embodying the principles explained in The Philosophy

of Grammar and partly carried out in the seven volumes of my Modern English

Grammar . After some years of hesitation I have now made the attempt, but of course the

responsibility for its shortcomings rests exclusively upon me. Parts of the manuscript

have been submitted to various friends, to whose kind criticisms I owe a great debt of

gratitude. I must mention Dr.E.R.Edwards, who read nearly the whole of the manuscript;

Professors C.A.Bodelsen and G.E.K.Braunholtz, Miss Isabel Fry, Dr.G.E.Fuhrken, and

Miss J.Young, Ph.D., who all of them read a greater or lesser number of chapters and

communicated to me their remarks. Niels Haislund, M.A., assisted me in copying the

manuscript, and gave me valuable assistance in reading the proofs. My heartfelt thanks to

all these kind scholars!

To the student I may perhaps offer two pieces of advice: to read in general the

examples before the rules, and, if he is not particularly interested in phonetics, to skip

Chapters II–VI until he has finished the rest of the book.

I may be allowed here to repeat what I wrote in 1909 in the first volume of my bigger

Grammar:

“It has been my endeavour in this work to represent English Grammar not as a set of

stiff dogmatic precepts, according to which some things are correct and others absolutely

wrong, but as something living and developing under continual fluctuations and

undulations, something that is founded on the past and prepares the way for the future,

something that is not always consistent or perfect, but progressing and perfectible—in

one word, human.”

A detailed exposition of the reasons that have led me to deviate from much of what is

usually found in English grammars, and some criticism of the views of other scholars,

will be found in a paper on “The System of Grammar,” which will be printed in a

volume, “Linguistica: Selected Papers in English, French, and German,” and will also be

sold separately. 1

OTTO JESPERSEN

GENTOFTE, COPENHAGEN

January 1933

1 London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd.

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