The Principles of English Grammar: With Comprehensive Outlines, and a Concise and Progressive System of Analysis and Parsing, for Schools and Colleges (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from The Principles of English Grammar: With Comprehensive Outlines, and a Concise and Progressive System of Analysis and Parsing, for Schools and Colleges

Thoughtful teachers have long felt the need of a text-book on Eng lish Grammar which would accord with the present state of Philology and Mental Science. The grammars in use seem to have been pre pared without careful investigation. The errors Of former ages are repeated. Thought and language are confounded, and the definitions are merely descriptions of prominent characteristics, not of features common and essential. In order to rescue English Grammar from this empirical state and reduce it to a Science, the author has devoted much thought and labor to the subject. The principles contained in this volume have been developed and tested in the recitation room and the study, and have been adopted only after careful consideration.

The nature of language is important as a conditioning fact. Speech is a natural endowment, but language is artificial, being evolved from a few roots, and elaborated and improved as the race have advanced in the social scale. The vocables and forms of expression are conventional, being shaped by physiological and social laws.

Language and thought are not identical. Mental acts are momentary; their formulation occupies time. Thinking in words is a double act: it includes the conception of the thought and also the conception Of its expression. Language is therefore the embodiment of a mental act in words, and the vernacular, the laws of thought and the general usage of cultivated persons become the test of accuracy.

The province of grammar 18 another important fact. Grammar is not the science of language; it treats only of a certain phase of language. Lexicology treats of the material element, of words in an isolated condition; Exegesis, of the expository element, of forms and modes of expression no longer current. Grammar treats of the formal element and investigates the principles, relations and forms Of words combined into sentences.

Logic is sometimes called general grammar. Logic is the art of reasoning, but grammar combines words into propositions for the use of the dialectician, points out the connection between ideas and words, and weaves into enduring forms thoughts and sentiments which other wise would die with their conception.

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