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After having published my Diagramming English on the web, it became clear that there would be an interest in a more basic grammar.
Almost twenty years ago it was claimed:
“In the four centuries since the time of Shakespeare, English has changed from a relatively unimportant European language with perhaps four million speakers into an international language
used in every continent by approximately eight hundred million people.”1
With the spread of the internet it is natural to assume that more and more people, especially many who are now children, will need help in understanding the vast amount of information available there.
A simple introductory grammar of English seems like a useful thing to publish and make available in a web format. This grammar was written for children who could already speak English. My goal is to work on this from time to time and make it more appropriate for the person who is learning English as a second language. Yet even from the first it should be useful to anyone who knows how to use English, but doesn’t understand the grammatical structures involved in putting together well-formed sentences. |
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Having been published in a culture 116 years ago, Southworth & Goddard contains many expressions and choices of vocabulary items that are now distinctly anachronistic.
I have taken the liberty of updating many such examples so as to convey a more current feeling of today’s world. I have also toned down the authors’ “violation of rule” and “error” in the direction of “ignorance of standards” and “informal usage.” Often what the authors have given as hard and fast rules I have changed to cautions against carelessness and suggestions for an improved style. As much as my disposition would allow, I have tried to retain the analysis of the authors. A rather noteworthy exception is their complete ignorance of what we now call a prepositional object of a verb. It seems that this may be due to a disregard for what for them would have been a rather subtle difference: verb “modification” contrasted with full verb “complementation.” Related to this is their ignorance of phrasal verbs and other mopho-syntactic phenomena. The authors have also introduced a system of diagramming sentences involving various ways of underscoring and bracketing the various parts of the sentence. This causes some inconvenience for web publication. What I have done in this case is make use of color on a gray background. Sometimes I have changed their system of arrows for showing modification dependencies to sets of imbedded pairs of brackets. More recently I have appended the diagramming system of Reed & Kellogg onto their diagrams. |
| Presenting the Essentials of Grammar.—Beginning with the sentence at Chapter X, the essentials of grammatical form and structure are simply and clearly presented. Abrupt transitions are avoided, and with a view to educating the reason as well as the understanding, an effort has been made to have each part naturally and logically connected with what precedes and what follows it. Each subject, moreover, is fully explained and illustrated, often by inductive exercises, so that thoughtful study of the sections in large type and of the illustrative examples will enable the learner without much further help to apprehend the most important principles, and to apply them intellegently in the practical exercises which make up much of the body of the book. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Use and Form.—No chapter is entitled Syntax; but the construction of sentences is developed from the beginning as fast and as fully as practicable, so that a child’s acquaintance with verbs, for instance, is by no means deferred until he reaches the chapter so headed. Without intentionally omitting any essential principle, much that has been engrafted upon English grammar from other languages is left out as false or burdensome. The invariable basis of classification for the parts of speech is use, and for inflection it is form. Cases, for example, are always treated as forms, of which the noun has two, and a few pronouns three,2 the many constructions of these parts of speech being considered separately. In the direction of simplicity verb phrases are distinguished from simple verbs. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The following typographical conventions and common abbreviations as well as any text on a yellow background have been added to the original authors’ work.
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