History of English grammars
Encyclopedia
The history of English grammars begins late in the sixteenth century with the Pamphlet for Grammar by William Bullokar
. In the early works, the structure and rules of English grammar
were contrasted with those of Latin. A more modern approach, incorporating phonology
, was introduced in the nineteenth century.
, written with the seeming goal of demonstrating that English was quite as rule-bound as Latin
, was published in 1586. Bullokar's grammar was faithfully modeled on William Lily
's Latin grammar, Rudimenta Grammatices (1534). Lily's grammar was being used in schools in England at that time, having been "prescribed" for them in 1542 by Henry VIII
. Although Bullokar wrote his grammar in English and used a "reformed spelling system" of his own invention, many English grammars, for much of the century after Bullokar's effort, were to be written in Latin; this was especially so for books whose authors were aiming to be scholarly. Christopher Cooper's Grammatica Linguæ Anglicanæ (1685) was the last English grammar written in Latin.
The yoke of Latin grammar writing bore down oppressively on much of the early history of English grammars. Any attempt by one author to assert an independent grammatical rule for English was quickly followed by equal avowals by others of truth of the corresponding Latin-based equivalent. Even as late as the early 19th century, Lindley Murray
, the author of one of the most widely used grammars of the day, was having to cite "grammatical authorities" to bolster the claim that grammatical cases in English are different from those in Ancient Greek
or Latin.
The focus on tradition, however, belied the role that other social forces had already begun to play in the early seventeenth century. In particular, increasing commerce, and the social changes it wrought, created new impetus for grammar writing. On the one hand, greater British role in international trade created demand for English grammars for speakers of other languages. Many such grammars were published in various European languages in the second half of the seventeenth century. On the other hand, English grammars began to reach a wider audience within Britain itself. They spread beyond their erstwhile readership of "learned," privileged, adult males to other groups of native speakers such as women, merchants, tradesmen, and even schoolboys. Consequently, by the early eighteenth century, many grammars, such as John Brightland's A Grammar of the English tongue (1711) and James Greenwood's Essay towards a practical English grammar, were targeting people without "Latin background," including the "fair sex" and children.
If by the end of the seventeenth century English grammar writing had made a modest start, totaling 16 new grammars since Bullokar's Pamphlet of 115 years before, by the end of the eighteenth, the pace was positively brisk; 270 new titles were added during that century. Both publishing and demand, moreover, would continue to mushroom. The first half of the nineteenth century would see the appearance of almost 900 new books on English grammar. Showing little originality, most new books took the tack of claiming—as justification for their appearance—that the needs of their particular target audience were still unmet or that a particular "grammatical point" had not been treated adequately in the preexisting texts, or oftentimes both. Texts that were both utilitarian and egalitarian were proliferating everywhere. Edward Shelley's The people's grammar; or English grammar without difficulties for 'the million (1848), for example, was written for "the mechanic and hard-working youth, in their solitary struggles for the acquirement of knowledge." Similarly, William Cobbett
's popular mid-century book was titled, A Grammar of the English Language, In a Series of Letters: Intended for the Use of Schools and of Young Persons in General, but more especially for the use of Soldiers, Sailors, Apprentices, and Plough-Boys.
, Bishop of Oxford and thereafter of London, scholar of Hebrew poetry, and for a short time professor of poetry at Oxford, was the first and the best known of the widely emulated grammarians of the 18th century. A self-effacing clergyman, he published his only work on English grammar, A Short Introduction to English Grammar, with critical notes, in 1762, without the author's name on the title page. His influence—extended through the works of his students Lindley Murray
and William Cobbett
—would last well into the late 19th century. He would also become, among prescriptive
grammarians, the target of choice for the criticism meted out by later descriptivist linguists.
Lowth's chief aim, shared with that of most eighteenth century grammarians, was to present a standard English grammar that taught its readers to express themselves with "propriety" and to accurately evaluate constructions for correctness. Written in a spry and unpretentious style, the book contained a large number of worked examples, whose popularity, especially among the self-taught, made it a big commercial success. Lowth employed footnotes in a new way. He used them not merely to expand on the finer points, but also to offer a critique of errors. Consequently, the book offered a two-tier discourse: elementary statements of rules in the main text, and more nuanced analyses of errors in the footnotes. However, since the samples chosen for the error analysis included those from authors such as Alexander Pope
, Jonathan Swift
, and Joseph Addison
, readers were sometimes discouraged by the immensity of the task before them.
, where it was studied by historical and comparative linguists. In 1832, Danish philologist, Rasmus Rask, published an English grammar, Engelsk Formlære, part of his extensive comparative studies in the grammars of Indo-European languages
. German philologist, Jacob Grimm
, the elder of the Brothers Grimm
, included English grammar in his monumental grammar of Germanic languages
, Deutsche Grammatik (1822–1837). German historical linguist Eduard Adolf Maetzner published his 1,700 page Englische Grammatik between 1860 and 1865; an English translation, An English grammar: methodical, analytical and historical appeared in 1874. Contributing little new to the intrinsic scientific study of English grammar, these works nonetheless showed that English was being studied seriously by the first professional linguists.
As phonology
became a full-fledged field, spoken English began to be studied scientifically as well, generating by the end of the nineteenth century an international enterprise investigating the structure of the language. This enterprise comprised scholars at various universities, their students who were training to be teachers of English, and journals publishing new research. All the pieces were in place for new "large-scale English grammars" which combined the disparate approaches of the previous decades. The first work to lay claim to the new scholarship was British linguist Henry Sweet's A new English grammar: logical and historical, published in two parts, Phonology and Accidence (1892) and Syntax
(1896), its title suggesting not only continuity and contrast with Maetzner's earlier work, but also kinship with the contemporary A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles (begun 1884), later the Oxford English Dictionary
(1895). Two other contemporary English grammars were also influential. English Grammar: Past and Present, by John Collinson Nesfield, was originally written for the market in colonial India
. It was later expanded to appeal to students in Britain as well, from young men preparing for various professional examinations to students in "Ladies' Colleges." Other books by Nesfield include A Junior Course In English Composition, A Senior Course In English Composition, But it was his A Manual Of English Grammar and Composition that proved really successful both in Britain and her Colonies. So much so that it formed the basis for many other Grammar and Composition Primers including but not limited to Warriner's English Grammar and Composition, and High School English Grammar and Composition fondly called Wren & Martin
by P.C. Wren and H. Martin. Grammar of spoken English (1924), by H. E. Palmer, written for the teaching and study of English as a foreign language
, included a full description of the intonation
patterns of English.
The next set wide-ranging English grammars were written by Danish and Dutch linguists. Danish linguist Otto Jespersen
, who had coauthored a few books with Henry Sweet, began work on his seven-volume Modern English grammar on historical principles in the first decade of the twentieth century. The first volume, Sounds and spellings, was published in 1909; it then took forty years for the remaining volumes on syntax (volumes 2 through 5), morphology (volume 6), and syntax again (volume 7), to be completed. Jespersen's original contribution was in analyzing the various parts of a sentence in terms of categories that he named, rank, junction, and nexus, forgoing the usual word classes. His ideas would inspire the later work of Noam Chomsky
and Randolph Quirk.
The Dutch tradition of writing English grammars, which began with Thomas Basson's The Conjugations in Englische and Netherdutche in the same year—1586—as William Bullokar's first English grammar (written in English), gained renewed strength in the early 20th century in the work of three grammarians: Hendrik Poutsma, Etsko Kruisinga, and Reinard Zandvoort. Poutsma's Grammar of late modern English, published between 1904 and 1929 and written for "continental, especially Dutch students," selected all its examples from English literature.
William Bullokar
William Bullokar was a 16th-century printer who devised a 40-letter phonetic alphabet for the English language. Its characters were in the black-letter or "gothic" writing style commonly used at the time...
. In the early works, the structure and rules of English grammar
English grammar
English grammar is the body of rules that describe the structure of expressions in the English language. This includes the structure of words, phrases, clauses and sentences...
were contrasted with those of Latin. A more modern approach, incorporating phonology
Phonology
Phonology is, broadly speaking, the subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with the sounds of language. That is, it is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use...
, was introduced in the nineteenth century.
Sixteenth to eighteenth centuries
The first English grammar, Pamphlet for Grammar by William BullokarWilliam Bullokar
William Bullokar was a 16th-century printer who devised a 40-letter phonetic alphabet for the English language. Its characters were in the black-letter or "gothic" writing style commonly used at the time...
, written with the seeming goal of demonstrating that English was quite as rule-bound as Latin
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
, was published in 1586. Bullokar's grammar was faithfully modeled on William Lily
William Lilye
William Lily was an English classical grammarian and scholar. He was an author of the most widely used Latin grammar textbook in England and was the first headmaster of St Paul's School, London.-Life:...
's Latin grammar, Rudimenta Grammatices (1534). Lily's grammar was being used in schools in England at that time, having been "prescribed" for them in 1542 by Henry VIII
Henry VIII of England
Henry VIII was King of England from 21 April 1509 until his death. He was Lord, and later King, of Ireland, as well as continuing the nominal claim by the English monarchs to the Kingdom of France...
. Although Bullokar wrote his grammar in English and used a "reformed spelling system" of his own invention, many English grammars, for much of the century after Bullokar's effort, were to be written in Latin; this was especially so for books whose authors were aiming to be scholarly. Christopher Cooper's Grammatica Linguæ Anglicanæ (1685) was the last English grammar written in Latin.
The yoke of Latin grammar writing bore down oppressively on much of the early history of English grammars. Any attempt by one author to assert an independent grammatical rule for English was quickly followed by equal avowals by others of truth of the corresponding Latin-based equivalent. Even as late as the early 19th century, Lindley Murray
Lindley Murray
Lindley Murray , grammarian, was born in a house near his father's mill, just north of Harper Tavern in Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, 18 miles northeast of Harrisburg. He was the eldest son of Robert Murray, the Quaker merchant, and Mary Lindley Murray, whose home was on a hill in Manhattan on what...
, the author of one of the most widely used grammars of the day, was having to cite "grammatical authorities" to bolster the claim that grammatical cases in English are different from those in Ancient Greek
Ancient Greek
Ancient Greek is the stage of the Greek language in the periods spanning the times c. 9th–6th centuries BC, , c. 5th–4th centuries BC , and the c. 3rd century BC – 6th century AD of ancient Greece and the ancient world; being predated in the 2nd millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek...
or Latin.
The focus on tradition, however, belied the role that other social forces had already begun to play in the early seventeenth century. In particular, increasing commerce, and the social changes it wrought, created new impetus for grammar writing. On the one hand, greater British role in international trade created demand for English grammars for speakers of other languages. Many such grammars were published in various European languages in the second half of the seventeenth century. On the other hand, English grammars began to reach a wider audience within Britain itself. They spread beyond their erstwhile readership of "learned," privileged, adult males to other groups of native speakers such as women, merchants, tradesmen, and even schoolboys. Consequently, by the early eighteenth century, many grammars, such as John Brightland's A Grammar of the English tongue (1711) and James Greenwood's Essay towards a practical English grammar, were targeting people without "Latin background," including the "fair sex" and children.
If by the end of the seventeenth century English grammar writing had made a modest start, totaling 16 new grammars since Bullokar's Pamphlet of 115 years before, by the end of the eighteenth, the pace was positively brisk; 270 new titles were added during that century. Both publishing and demand, moreover, would continue to mushroom. The first half of the nineteenth century would see the appearance of almost 900 new books on English grammar. Showing little originality, most new books took the tack of claiming—as justification for their appearance—that the needs of their particular target audience were still unmet or that a particular "grammatical point" had not been treated adequately in the preexisting texts, or oftentimes both. Texts that were both utilitarian and egalitarian were proliferating everywhere. Edward Shelley's The people's grammar; or English grammar without difficulties for 'the million (1848), for example, was written for "the mechanic and hard-working youth, in their solitary struggles for the acquirement of knowledge." Similarly, William Cobbett
William Cobbett
William Cobbett was an English pamphleteer, farmer and journalist, who was born in Farnham, Surrey. He believed that reforming Parliament and abolishing the rotten boroughs would help to end the poverty of farm labourers, and he attacked the borough-mongers, sinecurists and "tax-eaters" relentlessly...
's popular mid-century book was titled, A Grammar of the English Language, In a Series of Letters: Intended for the Use of Schools and of Young Persons in General, but more especially for the use of Soldiers, Sailors, Apprentices, and Plough-Boys.
Eighteenth century prescriptive grammars
Robert LowthRobert Lowth
Robert Lowth FRS was a Bishop of the Church of England, Oxford Professor of Poetry and the author of one of the most influential textbooks of English grammar.-Life:...
, Bishop of Oxford and thereafter of London, scholar of Hebrew poetry, and for a short time professor of poetry at Oxford, was the first and the best known of the widely emulated grammarians of the 18th century. A self-effacing clergyman, he published his only work on English grammar, A Short Introduction to English Grammar, with critical notes, in 1762, without the author's name on the title page. His influence—extended through the works of his students Lindley Murray
Lindley Murray
Lindley Murray , grammarian, was born in a house near his father's mill, just north of Harper Tavern in Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, 18 miles northeast of Harrisburg. He was the eldest son of Robert Murray, the Quaker merchant, and Mary Lindley Murray, whose home was on a hill in Manhattan on what...
and William Cobbett
William Cobbett
William Cobbett was an English pamphleteer, farmer and journalist, who was born in Farnham, Surrey. He believed that reforming Parliament and abolishing the rotten boroughs would help to end the poverty of farm labourers, and he attacked the borough-mongers, sinecurists and "tax-eaters" relentlessly...
—would last well into the late 19th century. He would also become, among prescriptive
Linguistic prescription
In linguistics, prescription denotes normative practices on such aspects of language use as spelling, grammar, pronunciation, and syntax. It includes judgments on what usages are socially proper and politically correct...
grammarians, the target of choice for the criticism meted out by later descriptivist linguists.
Lowth's chief aim, shared with that of most eighteenth century grammarians, was to present a standard English grammar that taught its readers to express themselves with "propriety" and to accurately evaluate constructions for correctness. Written in a spry and unpretentious style, the book contained a large number of worked examples, whose popularity, especially among the self-taught, made it a big commercial success. Lowth employed footnotes in a new way. He used them not merely to expand on the finer points, but also to offer a critique of errors. Consequently, the book offered a two-tier discourse: elementary statements of rules in the main text, and more nuanced analyses of errors in the footnotes. However, since the samples chosen for the error analysis included those from authors such as Alexander Pope
Alexander Pope
Alexander Pope was an 18th-century English poet, best known for his satirical verse and for his translation of Homer. He is the third-most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, after Shakespeare and Tennyson...
, Jonathan Swift
Jonathan Swift
Jonathan Swift was an Irish satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer , poet and cleric who became Dean of St...
, and Joseph Addison
Joseph Addison
Joseph Addison was an English essayist, poet, playwright and politician. He was a man of letters, eldest son of Lancelot Addison...
, readers were sometimes discouraged by the immensity of the task before them.
Nineteenth century to present
It was during the nineteenth century that modern-language studies became systematized. In the case of English, this happened first in continental EuropeContinental Europe
Continental Europe, also referred to as mainland Europe or simply the Continent, is the continent of Europe, explicitly excluding European islands....
, where it was studied by historical and comparative linguists. In 1832, Danish philologist, Rasmus Rask, published an English grammar, Engelsk Formlære, part of his extensive comparative studies in the grammars of Indo-European languages
Indo-European languages
The Indo-European languages are a family of several hundred related languages and dialects, including most major current languages of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and South Asia and also historically predominant in Anatolia...
. German philologist, Jacob Grimm
Jacob Grimm
Jacob Ludwig Carl Grimm was a German philologist, jurist and mythologist. He is best known as the discoverer of Grimm's Law, the author of the monumental Deutsches Wörterbuch, the author of Deutsche Mythologie and, more popularly, as one of the Brothers Grimm, as the editor of Grimm's Fairy...
, the elder of the Brothers Grimm
Brothers Grimm
The Brothers Grimm , Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm , were German academics, linguists, cultural researchers, and authors who collected folklore and published several collections of it as Grimm's Fairy Tales, which became very popular...
, included English grammar in his monumental grammar of Germanic languages
Germanic languages
The Germanic languages constitute a sub-branch of the Indo-European language family. The common ancestor of all of the languages in this branch is called Proto-Germanic , which was spoken in approximately the mid-1st millennium BC in Iron Age northern Europe...
, Deutsche Grammatik (1822–1837). German historical linguist Eduard Adolf Maetzner published his 1,700 page Englische Grammatik between 1860 and 1865; an English translation, An English grammar: methodical, analytical and historical appeared in 1874. Contributing little new to the intrinsic scientific study of English grammar, these works nonetheless showed that English was being studied seriously by the first professional linguists.
As phonology
Phonology
Phonology is, broadly speaking, the subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with the sounds of language. That is, it is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use...
became a full-fledged field, spoken English began to be studied scientifically as well, generating by the end of the nineteenth century an international enterprise investigating the structure of the language. This enterprise comprised scholars at various universities, their students who were training to be teachers of English, and journals publishing new research. All the pieces were in place for new "large-scale English grammars" which combined the disparate approaches of the previous decades. The first work to lay claim to the new scholarship was British linguist Henry Sweet's A new English grammar: logical and historical, published in two parts, Phonology and Accidence (1892) and Syntax
Syntax
In linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing phrases and sentences in natural languages....
(1896), its title suggesting not only continuity and contrast with Maetzner's earlier work, but also kinship with the contemporary A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles (begun 1884), later the Oxford English Dictionary
Oxford English Dictionary
The Oxford English Dictionary , published by the Oxford University Press, is the self-styled premier dictionary of the English language. Two fully bound print editions of the OED have been published under its current name, in 1928 and 1989. The first edition was published in twelve volumes , and...
(1895). Two other contemporary English grammars were also influential. English Grammar: Past and Present, by John Collinson Nesfield, was originally written for the market in colonial India
Colonial India
Colonial India refers to areas of the Indian Subcontinent under the control of European colonial powers, through trade and conquest. The first European power to arrive in India was the army of Alexander the Great in 327–326 BC. The satraps he established in the north west of the subcontinent...
. It was later expanded to appeal to students in Britain as well, from young men preparing for various professional examinations to students in "Ladies' Colleges." Other books by Nesfield include A Junior Course In English Composition, A Senior Course In English Composition, But it was his A Manual Of English Grammar and Composition that proved really successful both in Britain and her Colonies. So much so that it formed the basis for many other Grammar and Composition Primers including but not limited to Warriner's English Grammar and Composition, and High School English Grammar and Composition fondly called Wren & Martin
Wren & Martin
Wren & Martin refers to a single book High School English Grammar and Composition or collectively, a series of English grammar textbooks written jointly by P. C. Wren and H. Martin. Written primarily for the children of British officers resident in India, these books were widely adopted by Indian...
by P.C. Wren and H. Martin. Grammar of spoken English (1924), by H. E. Palmer, written for the teaching and study of English as a foreign language
ESL
ESL is a common abbreviation for English as a Second Language, see English language learning and teaching.ESL may also refer to:-Companies:...
, included a full description of the intonation
Intonation
Intonation may refer to:*Intonation , the variation of tone used when speaking*Intonation , a musician's realization of pitch accuracy, or the pitch accuracy of a musical instrument*Intonation Music Festival, held in Chicago...
patterns of English.
The next set wide-ranging English grammars were written by Danish and Dutch linguists. Danish linguist Otto Jespersen
Otto Jespersen
Jens Otto Harry Jespersen or Otto Jespersen was a Danish linguist who specialized in the grammar of the English language.He was born in Randers in northern Jutland and attended Copenhagen University, earning degrees in English, French, and Latin...
, who had coauthored a few books with Henry Sweet, began work on his seven-volume Modern English grammar on historical principles in the first decade of the twentieth century. The first volume, Sounds and spellings, was published in 1909; it then took forty years for the remaining volumes on syntax (volumes 2 through 5), morphology (volume 6), and syntax again (volume 7), to be completed. Jespersen's original contribution was in analyzing the various parts of a sentence in terms of categories that he named, rank, junction, and nexus, forgoing the usual word classes. His ideas would inspire the later work of Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and...
and Randolph Quirk.
The Dutch tradition of writing English grammars, which began with Thomas Basson's The Conjugations in Englische and Netherdutche in the same year—1586—as William Bullokar's first English grammar (written in English), gained renewed strength in the early 20th century in the work of three grammarians: Hendrik Poutsma, Etsko Kruisinga, and Reinard Zandvoort. Poutsma's Grammar of late modern English, published between 1904 and 1929 and written for "continental, especially Dutch students," selected all its examples from English literature.
Timeline of English grammars
- 1551. John Hart The opening of the unreasonable writing of our Inglish toung
- 1586. William BullokarWilliam BullokarWilliam Bullokar was a 16th-century printer who devised a 40-letter phonetic alphabet for the English language. Its characters were in the black-letter or "gothic" writing style commonly used at the time...
: Brief Grammar of English. - 1594. Paul Greaves: Grammatica Anglicana.
- 1617. Alexander HumeAlexander HumeAlexander Hume was a Scottish poet.The son of Patrick, 5th Lord Polwarth, he was educated at the University of St. Andrews and on the Continent. He was originally destined for the law, but devoted himself to the service of the church, and became minister of Logie in Stirlingshire...
: Orthographie and Congruitie of the Britan Tongue. - 1619/1621. Alexander GillAlexander Gill the elderAlexander Gill the Elder , also spelled Gil, was an English scholar, spelling reformer, and high-master of St Paul's School, where his pupils included John Milton...
: Logonomia Anglica. - 1634. Charles ButlerCharles Butler (beekeeper)Charles Butler , sometimes called the Father of English Beekeeping, was a logician, grammarist, author, minister , and an influential beekeeper. He was also an early proponent of English spelling reform...
: English Grammar. - 1640. Ben JonsonBen JonsonBenjamin Jonson was an English Renaissance dramatist, poet and actor. A contemporary of William Shakespeare, he is best known for his satirical plays, particularly Volpone, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair, which are considered his best, and his lyric poems...
: The English Grammar. - 1646. Joshua Poole: The English Accidence.
- 1653. John Wallis: Grammatica Linguæ Anglicanæ.
- 1654. Jeremiah Wharton: The English Grammar.
- 1662. James HowellJames HowellJames Howell was a 17th-century Anglo-Welsh historian and writer who is in many ways a representative figure of his age. The son of a Welsh clergyman, he was for much of his life in the shadow of his elder brother Thomas Howell, who became Lord Bishop of Bristol.-Education:In 1613 he gained his B.A...
: A New English Grammar. - 1669. John Newton: School Pastime for Young Children: or the Rudiments of Grammar.
- 1669. John MiltonJohn MiltonJohn Milton was an English poet, polemicist, a scholarly man of letters, and a civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under Oliver Cromwell...
: Accedence Commenc't Grammar (a Latin grammar written in English). - 1671. Thomas Lye: The Child's Delight.
- 1685. Christopher Cooper: Grammatica Linguæ Anglicanæ.
- 1688. Guy Miège: The English Grammar.
- 1693. Joseph Aickin: The English grammar.
- 1700. A. Lane: A Key to the Art of Letters.
- 1745. Ann Fisher (grammarian)Ann Fisher (grammarian)Ann Fisher was an author and grammarian. Her A New Grammar published in 1745 makes her the earliest published female author on English grammar, with deference to Elizabeth Elstob who published a grammar for English-Saxon in 1715, though not English in the same sense.-Life:Fisher was born in...
A New Grammar. - 1762. Robert LowthRobert LowthRobert Lowth FRS was a Bishop of the Church of England, Oxford Professor of Poetry and the author of one of the most influential textbooks of English grammar.-Life:...
: A short introduction to English grammar: with critical notes. - 1763. John AshJohn Ash (divine)John Ash was an English Baptist minister at Pershore, Worcestershire, divine, and author of an English dictionary and grammar books.-Life:...
: Grammatical institutes: or, An easy introduction to Dr. Lowth's English grammar. - 1765. William Ward: An Essay on English Grammar.
- 1766. Samuel JohnsonSamuel JohnsonSamuel Johnson , often referred to as Dr. Johnson, was an English author who made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer...
: A dictionary of the English Language...: to which is prefixed, a Grammar of the English Language. - 1772. Joseph PriestleyJoseph PriestleyJoseph Priestley, FRS was an 18th-century English theologian, Dissenting clergyman, natural philosopher, chemist, educator, and political theorist who published over 150 works...
: The Rudiments of English Grammar: Adapted to the Use of Schools. - 1795. Lindley MurrayLindley MurrayLindley Murray , grammarian, was born in a house near his father's mill, just north of Harper Tavern in Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, 18 miles northeast of Harrisburg. He was the eldest son of Robert Murray, the Quaker merchant, and Mary Lindley Murray, whose home was on a hill in Manhattan on what...
: English grammar: adapted to the different classes of learners. - 1804. Noah WebsterNoah WebsterNoah Webster was an American educator, lexicographer, textbook pioneer, English spelling reformer, political writer, editor, and prolific author...
: A Grammatical Institute of the English Language. - 1818. William CobbettWilliam CobbettWilliam Cobbett was an English pamphleteer, farmer and journalist, who was born in Farnham, Surrey. He believed that reforming Parliament and abolishing the rotten boroughs would help to end the poverty of farm labourers, and he attacked the borough-mongers, sinecurists and "tax-eaters" relentlessly...
: A Grammar of the English Language, In a Series of Letters. - 1850. William Chauncey Fowler: English grammar: The English language in its elements and forms.
- 1874 Eduard Adolf Maetzner, An English grammar: methodical, analytical, and historical. With a treatise on the orthography, prosody, inflections and syntax of the English tongue, and numerous authorities cited in order of historical development. (English translation of Englische Grammatik (1860–65)).
- 1892/98. Henry Sweet: A New English Grammar, Logical and Historical (Part 1: Introduction, Phonology, and Accidence; Part 2: Syntax).
- 1904–1929. H. Poutsma: A Grammar of Modern English (5 volumes).
- 1909–1932. Etsko Kruisinga: A Handbook of Present-day English
- 1909–1940. Otto JespersenOtto JespersenJens Otto Harry Jespersen or Otto Jespersen was a Danish linguist who specialized in the grammar of the English language.He was born in Randers in northern Jutland and attended Copenhagen University, earning degrees in English, French, and Latin...
: A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles. - 1945. R. W. Zandvoort: A Handbook of English Grammar.
- 1952. Charles C. Fries: The Structure of English: An Introduction to the Construction of English Sentences.
- 1984. M. A. K. HallidayMichael HallidayMichael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday is a British linguist who developed an internationally influential model of language, the systemic functional linguistic model. His grammatical descriptions go by the name of systemic functional grammar .-Biography:Halliday was born and raised in England...
: An Introduction to Functional Grammar. - 1985. Randolph Quirk, Sidney GreenbaumSidney GreenbaumSidney Greenbaum was a British scholar of the English language and of linguistics. He was Quain Professor of English language and literature at University College London from 1983 to 1990 and Director of the Survey of English Usage, 1983-96...
, Geoffrey LeechGeoffrey LeechGeoffrey Leech was Professor of Linguistics and Modern English Language at Lancaster University from 1974 to 2002. He then became Research Professor in English Linguistics...
, and Jan Svartvik: A comprehensive grammar of the English language. - 1999. Douglas Biber, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad, and Edward Finegan: Longman grammar of spoken and written English.
- 2002. Rodney HuddlestonRodney HuddlestonRodney D. Huddleston is a linguist and grammarian specializing in the study and description of English.Huddleston is the primary author of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language , which presents a comprehensive descriptive grammar of English.He earned his PhD from the University of Edinburgh...
and Geoffrey Pullum: The Cambridge Grammar of the English LanguageThe Cambridge Grammar of the English LanguageThe Cambridge Grammar of the English Language is a book that presents a comprehensive descriptive grammar of English. Its primary authors are Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum. It was published by Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, in 2002.-Reviews:* Aarts, Bas. . Grammatici certant...
. - 2006. Ronald Carter and Michael McCarthy: The Cambridge Grammar of English.
- 2011. Bas Aarts: "Oxford Modern English Grammar".