The Professor Greene whom Swinton mentions here, was Samuel S.

Swinton is referring here to the famous grammarian Lindley Murray, whose English Grammar was popular in the United States in the early part of the century.

As regards the development of syntax in the United States in the nineteenth century, one grammarian of that period, namely William Swinton, makes the following revealing statement: “The introduction, some thirty years ago, of the method of Sentential ANALYSIS, devised by the German philologist Becker, and adapted to American school use in the meritorious works of Professor Greene and others, marks the only considerable innovation, in this country, on the Murray system” (William Swinton, A Progressive Grammar of the English Tongue, pp.

London: Academic Press, 1976 about page 236):

In James McCawley (ed.), Notes from the Linguistic Underground., 229–242. On the historical source of immediate constituent analysis. According to the historian Keith Percival (1976.Gibbs, in his Philological Studies with English Illustrations (New Haven: Durrie & Peck, 1857), though without the table notation. They were applied to English by an American, Josiah W.Zum Selbstunterricht in der Muttersprache, eingerichtet aund mit einer Erklärung der Gebrauchs-Methode versehen, von Wilhelm Nast.) Moreover, Becker’s ideas were very influential in America: His tables seems to have been popular, as we find a very similar one in a grammar-book by a different author (Wurst, Raimund Jakob. His ‘Schulgrammatik’ (1831) offers a slightly different use of tables (p.696): L’affaire du petit drame : filiation franco-russe ou communauté de pensée? (Tesnière et Dmitrievskij). This idea was also published a few years later by Wilhelm von Humboldt, who saw the verb as the word which brings ‘life’ to the otherwise inert subject and predicate (Sériot, Patrick. Instead, it presents the verb as the link (labelled ‘Kopula’, containing any finite verb, not just the traditional ‘copula’ BE) between the subject and the predicate. It rejects the logical analysis of the sentence into just two parts: subject and predicate, where the verb is part of the predicate.The first column (without a label) is what is now called the ‘Vorfeld’ (‘forefield’), the one element before the verb, which has no equivalent in Latin. It reflects a deliberate break with the Latin-based grammatical analysis which had till then dominated schools in Germany, as in other countries.This table is significant for two reasons: On the other hand, the terms analyse de la phrase and analyse des phrases (analysis of the sentence / of sentences) is already well established in French well before that, as can be seen from this Google N-gram. (For both German and English, the equivalent n-grams don’t start till 1880.)īecker also may have been the first to use tables for presenting sentence structure, as in this representative example from the same book (p.381): This businesss – the analysis of the sentence – is made easier for the beginner if he notices that two members express a predicative sentence-relation when they express a thought, and an attributive or objective sentence-relation when they express a concept, namely first when they express the concept of a being and lastly when they express the concept of an activity. For a certain understanding of speech, to which grammar gives rise, it is important that one should recognise easily and quickly to what kind of sentence-relations a member of the sentence belongs as ‘factor’, and whether it is headword or relation-word in the same, and that one should give each member of the sentence its place and significance in the whole. The term ‘analysis’ may have been applied for the first time to syntax, at least in German or English, by Karl Ferdinand Becker in his 1827 Deutsche Sprachlehre (Vol 2, p.295):Ĭomment. German educationalists seem to have invented both the main diagramming systems taken up in the UK and the USA: tables and trees.

German grammar structure