The Philosophy of Grammar (Norton Library

by Otto Jesperson

"My endeavor has been, without neglecting investigation into the details of the languages known to me, to give due prominence to the great principles underlying the grammars of all languages, and thus to make my contribution to a grammatical science based at the same time on sound psychology, on sane logic, and on solid facts of linguistic history," wrote the great linguistic scholar Otto Jesperson, when he made this important study forty years ago. He had become convinced of the necessity of studying language through the observation of living speech and only secondarily by examination of written documents. The Philosophy of Grammar , a radical innovation in linguistics research when it was first published, is now a standard reference work and all students in the field should be familiar with it. The topics covered are living grammar, systemic grammar, parts of speech, the three ranks, junction and nexus, nexus-substantives, subject and predicate, object, case, number, person, sex and gender, comparison, time and tense, direct and indirect speech, classification of utterances, moods, and negation. Believing that a fixed terminology could be a hindrance to real understanding, Mr. Jesperson introduced new terms "neither very numerous nor very difficult" and discarded some he felt were outmoded. "The great merit of this work," commented the reviewer for The Times Literary Supplement , "seems to be in the thorough shaking-up which it gives to a great many venerated idols."

Genres: Philosophy, Linguistics, Language, Nonfiction

356 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1924

Reviews

[James F · Rating 5 out of 5]

This may be the best book I have ever read on language; probably Jespersen's most important work, it is definitely different from and better than the same author's earlier Language which I reviewed two weeks ago. That one was in parts very speculative, while as he says himself, "in this volume I generally keep aloof from speculations about primitive grammar and the origin of grammatical elements." The book is titled accurately a "philosophy" of grammar, in that he discusses all the concepts that have been used for talking about grammar and shows that most of them have been poorly defined, or are in some cases not useful at all. He proposes new explanations and a largely new terminology, some of which have been widely accepted and some not.

Although he occasionally refers to other languages, the book is largely based on the Indo-European (or as he calls it, Aryan) family; apart from Danish, most of his examples are taken from languages I can read. I understand better now many things I never really understood, or in some cases had never even thought about. While not all his comments about English usage seem right to me, this may be because he naturally (as a professor of English in Denmark) bases himself on British rather than American English, and because he wrote this a hundred years ago and the language has of course changed much in a century. In fact he mentions many tendencies which have since gone further.

The book was very influential and is a must-read for anyone who is interested in language.

[A. B. · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a read. Wonderful, simply wonderful.

[lita]

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