Otto Jespersen

This volume, first published in 1960 to commemorate the one hundredth birthday of Jespersen, collects together as many of his writings as possible in order to allow students of the English language, or indeed of language in general, to read those shorter papers which have hitherto escaped their notice. The layout of the book largely follows the nature of the subjects dealt with: English grammar, phonetics, history of English, language teaching, language in general, international language and miscellaneous papers.

This volume, first published in 1960 to commemorate the one hundredth birthday of Jespersen, collects together as many of his writings as possible in order to allow students of the English language, or indeed of language in general, to read those shorter papers which have hitherto escaped their notice. The layout of the book largely follows the nature of the subjects dealt with: English grammar, phonetics, history of English, language teaching, language in general, international language and miscellaneous papers.

Part of the Otto Jespersen collected English Writings Collection, originally published in 1894, this volume is to a certain extent an English translation of Jespersens’ ‘Studier over Engelske Kasus, nted en Indledning: Freniskridt i Sproget’, which was to the University of Copenhagen in February, 1891 on the development of English Language, but with some notable revisions when translated to English.

This book was first published in 1904.

This book was first published in 1922.

This book was first published in 1929.

This book was first published in 1924.

First Published in 2004. A classic of English grammar, Essentials of English Grammar provides a common ground for the traditionalist and the structural or descriptive linguist. Jespersen's work provides insight into the fundamental concepts that underlie the linguistic approach, but at the same time the foundation of the traditional approach is retained. grammar, giving the student a real insight into the structure of the language. Grammatical rules are laid out in a clear, concise way and are illustrated with carefully selected examples.

This study grew out of a series of lectures Jespersen gave at Columbia University in 1909-10, called "An Introduction to English Grammar." It is the connected presentation of Jespersen's views of the general principles of grammar based on years of studying various languages through both direct observation of living speech and written and printed documents. "[The Philosophy of Grammar and Analytic Syntax] set forth the most extensive and original theory of universal grammar prior to the work of Chomsky and other generative grammarians of the last thirty years."--Arne Juul and Hans F. Nielsen, in Otto Jespersen: Facets of His Life and Work "Besides being one of the most perceptive observers and original thinkers that the field of linguistics has ever known, Jespersen was also one of its most entertaining writers, and reading The Philosophy of Grammar is fun. Read it, enjoy it."--James D. McCawley, from the Introduction Otto Jespersen (1860-1943), an authority on the growth and structure of language, was the Chair of the English Department at the University of Copenhagen. Among his many works are A Modern English Grammar and Analytic Syntax, the latter published by the University of Chicago Press.

Here the great Danish linguist Otto Jespersen puts forward his views on grammatical structure in a kind of shorthand formalism, devising symbols that represent various grammatical elements and then analyzing numerous sentences in terms of these symbols. The contemporaneity of these analyses is remarkable, for they allude to concepts that were uncongenial to linguists in 1937 when the book was first published, but which have come to be generally accepted in the linguistics community during the past twenty-five years.