How to tell the parts of speech, an introduction to English grammar

Front matter

I I

I H

HH

Introduction to lEnslisfj Grammar

BY THE

REV. EDWIN A. ABBOTT, D.D.,

Head Master of the City of London School;

AUTHOR OF "HOW TO WRITE CLEARLY," "HOW TO PARSE," AND, JOINTLY

WITH PROFESSOR SEELEY, OF CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY, ENGLAND,

OF "ENGLISH LESSONS FOR ENGLISH PEOPLE."

AMERICAN EDITION,

JSririseJj snB Enlarges,

By JOHN G. R. McELROY, A.M.,

PROFESSOR OF RHETORIC AND THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA.

BOSTON:

ROBERTS BROTHERS.

IE nil

Copyright, 1881, By Roberts Brothers.

University Press: John Wilson and Son, Cambridge.

NOTE TO THE AMEBIC AN EDITION.

Dr. Abbott's grammars, How to Tell the Parts of Speech and How to Parse, are distinguished, not alone by the reform the points of which he records on page viii. of his Preface to the .present work, but also by the unloading from the subject of all its rubbish, — useless tables of foreign plurals, long paradigms of forms already well known or to be learned only by experience, etc., etc. (Preface, p. x).

Both these praiseworthy characteristics are carefully preserved in the reprint ; the few changes made (after consultation with Dr. Abbott, and by his permission) in no way affecting essentials. A few technical terms, omitted by the author but fully described by him, are added ; paragraph-numbers, consecutive throughout the book, are given, to facilitate references and the setting of lessons ; and numerous exercises, suggested by Dr. Abbott in Note 3, are inserted. These exercises, also numbered consecutively, will, it is hoped, not only render the meaning of the text more clear, but will also serve as lessons in Composition. Grammar and Composition are (in elementary instruction, certainly) correlatives ; and they have both suffered in the too common obscuring of their mutual relations.

Matter added in this edition is denoted by the sign *.

A few of Dr. Abbott's Notes are taken up into the text, but as far as possible in Dr. Abbott's own words. New notes are then substituted; as, in other places, additional notes are inserted.

J. G. E. McE.

Preface

Ttte conviction that any child can be taught "how to tell the Parts of Speech n in any sentence that he can understand, has induced me to publish this little book. I believe that a very young child may be taught, almost without knowing that he is being taught, first to classify English words according to their function in the sentence, and then to infer the nature of each word from its function ; or, as a child would put it, to tell you first what the word does, and then what Part of Speech the word is.

The principal mistake in teaching English grammar hitherto seems to have been the attempt to assimilate it to Latin grammar. All the grammatical nomenclature of the inflected Latin language having been imported, as a matter of course, into the teaching of the uninfected English, teachers next set to work at finding English things for the Latin names. For example, they first imported into English the Latin word " Gender," which represents a Latin reality, and then, inventing an English unreality to correspond to the Latin importation, they insisted on making their pupils repeat, as an important point in English grammar, that "hen" is the feminine of "cock," and "she- •goat" of "he-goat." In the same way, a whole system of syntactical concords was invented, not because the concords existed, but because their names existed, having been obtruded into English grammar. This has given a sense of unreality to elementary English teaching, from which even now we have not quite extricated ourselves.

vi Preface.

The following extract from a paper read before "the Birmingham Association of Teachers of all Grades" will serve as an exposition of the remedy suggested and aimed at in the following pages : —

" The reform that I would suggest is based, 1st, upon honesty j a determination to approach the subject with a single eye, to discard all one's hampering Latin notions, and not to say one sees in English what one really does not see; 2d, upon experiment, guiding a boy from his own language (not from poetical examples, nor from choice classical prose), to see the necessity of certain words ; 3d, upon reasoning , teaching him to reason out what part of speech each word is for himself.

" Of these three principles, honesty needs no comment, nor does experiment need much (though some teachers seem to be hardly aware how valuable a lesson English grammar may be made in the way of enlarging a child's stock of words and notions by i experiment 7 ) : but how is a boy to reason out what part of speech a word is ? Thus : he is to be taught for some time to - tell you what a word does , before he is asked or even permitted to tell you what the word is. The fundamental principle of English grammar may be stated with little exaggeration as being this, that any tcord may be used as any part of speech. It is therefore the force and meaning of the word, as gathered from the meaning of the sentence, that must determine what part of speech the word is ; for example, whether i considering 7 is a Participle, an ordinary Noun, or a Verbal Noun, a part of some Tense in a Verb, or a Preposition.* We must, therefore, not allow our pupil to tell

* For example, in the words " Considering your youth, it is possible your fault may be pardoned." If this sentence is English, which can scarcely be denied, it is the merest pedantry to deny that " considering" is a Preposition here. See Morris's " Historical Outlines of English Accidence," p. 206.

Preface. vii

us what part of speech the word is till he has told us its function, or, in his own words, what the word does.

u Perhaps some one may say ' Of course, no good teacher would let his pupils say what part of speech a word is without being able to explain why.' But I submit that this is not quite the same thing. Giving reasons after the answer is not the same mental process as giving first the facts, and then deducing the answer from the facts. A boy that has given a bad answer will generally find little difficulty in supporting it with a bad reason. But if you fix his attention first on what the word does, before he has committed himself to an error, and while his mind is open to receive the truth, he is more likely to reason in an unbiased and honest way ; and, besides, he will attach importance to that which is really important, — I mean the function, and not the name of the word.

"I should like to be able to go into any elementary school, and to be sure of hearing children reasoning thus : ' Quickly tells you how he came; therefore it is an Adverb. 7 * Black tells you what sort of a horse it was; therefore it is an Adjective.' i Horse is the name of an animal ; therefore it is a Noun. 7 t That joins two sentences together : therefore it is a Conjunction. 7 * Twice tells you how often he fell; therefore it is an Adverb. 7 That word 'therefore 7 is a word that might with advantage be indelibly engraved on the heart of every child. In the use of that word consists the system that I wish to recommend. Facts first, reasoning from the facts afterwards. I stand here as against the claims of 6 because, 7 to advocate the claims of i therefore. 7

" Eather more time and pains than are given at present will perhaps be required to teach a child thus to experimentalize, to reason, and to classify : but the time will probably be well bestowed ; and, besides, we may perhaps gain time by dispensing with a good deal now generally viii Preface.

taught. I should be disposed to give up as either superfluous or hopeless the attempt to teach au English child how to speak English out of an English Grammar. If he is ever to speak English correctly, he will learn it byspeaking it ; if he is ever to use the words loci and cherubim, maxima and minima, he will, before he uses them, have learned the correct forms, by hearing others use them. Nor do I see, I confess, the use of making an English boy go through the whole of the Verb ' I love/ including such out-of-the-way Tenses as ' I may have been loving/ i I shall have been loved/ etc. A Verb thus learned seems to me to convey little benefit, and gives a sense of unreality to the lesson — for the boy uses his Verbs in all probability quite correctly already — and it is a very dull and wearisome task. I would discard the task, and all such tasks, and make the business of the teacher not to teach the boy how to speak English, but how to understand English, and how to see the reasons for the anomalies in it. Common faults, if they are common in a certain neighborhood, such as l says 1/ ' will ' for ' shall/ and the like, may be eradicated without compelling a boy to go through the whole of an English Verb ) and the symmetry of the Tenses may be perceived better, not worse, by discarding the drudgery." *

To come to details — it is hoped that the Exercises may be less wearisome than such exercises mostly are. They have been written with the special purpose of exemplifying the rules of parsing, while at the same time they have been thrown into the form of little tales or fables. They are intended chiefly as oral exercises, but may be afterwards written.

It seems to me to have been a serious mistake in teaching English Grammar to give young children, by way of examples and exercises, chips of sentences, always dry,

* The Tenses are not dealt with in this book.

Preface. ix

dull, and uninteresting, and often ambiguous, and to call them " Simple Exercises." Easy and connected narrative (not poetical extracts, which are full of inversions and irregularities) should be given to a child as soon as he begins to parse. For no child ought to be able to parse a sentence that he does not perfectly understand.

The Specimen Exercises worked out for the child are purposely made more difficult than the Exercises given to the child to work out for himself. The intention has been gradually to prepare the learner to grapple with difficulties in a logical way, and to accustom him to believe that all difficulties can be logically overcome. For undoubtedly there are difficulties in English grammar ; there are probably more in English than in Latin and Greek. But the beauty of the difficulties in English grammar is that they can be reasoned about by English children, and that the materials for such reasoning lie in the child's own mouth: his own speech supplies him with the best foundation for argument. For they are to be solved by appeal, not' to inflections, but to the function of each word, which an English boy is quite able to comprehend, provided that the subject-matter is suitably simple.

At the risk of appearing to practise mechanical, while advocating intelligent teaching, I have ventured to insert " tests," side by side with definitions. Experience has convinced me that they are useful as occasional crutches, and can easily be thrown aside when no longer needed.

If the book should seem somewhat diffuse, attempting to fill up what should be supplied rather by a teacher than a book, my apology must be that it is intended for parents as well as for professional teachers, and that most books on this subject hitherto have rather erred on the side of conciseness than diffuseness.

Perhaps the attempt to be colloquial and to avoid hard words may seem to some experienced teachers carried to x Preface.

excess. But I cannot help thinking that one cause of the present unsatisfactory condition of the teaching of English grammar is to be found in the exuberant vocabulary of technical terms often obtruded into elementary books. Far better, as it seems to me, to lead the pupil first to the things, teaching him to recognize different classes of Verbs, Conjunctions, Adjectives, and to reserve for a later treatise the technical names of such distinctions. To take an instance, I have been asked why the usual Definition of a Preposition instead of being placed in the text, has been relegated to the notes, for the use of any teachers that may like to use it? My answer is that, in an elementary book, to define a word by saying that it " shows the relation of a Noun or Pronoun to some other word in the sentence" seems to me of little use even for clever children, and of great harm for dull ones. I confess further, for my part, I should have thought that in the sentence " Thomas protects John," Thomas stands in the relation of a protector to John, so that "protects" shows the relation between "Thomas' 7 and "John," and is therefore, according to this definition, a Preposition. Possibly, therefore, the definition ought to be rejected because it is false, certainly because it is unintelligible to those for whom it is intended.

The notes at the end of the book are intended rather for the teacher than the learner, to meet difficulties and answer questions that may arise in the course of teaching.

Some explanation may be required of the title, " How to tell the Parts of Speech." The reason for selecting this title, and for not calling the book an " English Grammar " is, that a great many boys learn " English grammar " for several years without being able to tell an Adjective from an Adverb, or a Conjunction from a Preposition. Out of about three hundred boys, averaging more than twelve years of age, and examined in one year as candidates for admission into the City of London School, less than half

Preface. xi

could tell what part of speech " quickly" was. It therefore suggested itself as possible that a less ambitious boolr than an " English Grammar/ 7 a book that dared to dispense with a full list of the names of male and female animals, and that ventured to omit the inculcation of such minutiae as the plurals of cherub and locus, — in a word, a book that assumed that English boys will learn English by speaking and reading it, if they are to learn it at all — might have a modest but useful work to do in simply teaching children, what at present few children know, namely, "how to tell the Parts of Speech."

A little pupil, trained according to this system, once answered the question "How are you getting on with your grammar ? n by saying that " he was not learning grammar, but he could tell an Adverb from a Conjunction." It is the Author's hope that many children may, in the same way, be taught by this little book to tell an Adverb from a Conjunction, even though they may be ignorant that they are u learning grammar."

I am under obligations for much valuable help to many able and experienced teachers, some of whom I have before had occasion to thank in other Prefaces, and all of whom I would gladly mention here if space permitted. But more than a general acknowledgment is due from me to Mr. Gr. S. Brockington, one of the Assistant Masters of King Edward's School, Birmingham, and to Mr. T. W. Chambers, B.A., Scholar of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, one of my own colleagues at the City of London School, whose careful and searching criticisms have had a material effect in modifying the book as it passed through the press.

In reviewing the Second Edition I have added an abridg-ment of the Appendix on Spelling, together with the Etymoxii Preface,

logical Glossary of Grammatical Terms, both of which are contained in the Second Part, entitled "How to Parse." These additions are made for the convenience of those who may use this book as an introduction to English Grammar, without proceeding to " How to Parse."

If the pupil is intended to proceed to the Second Part, I should recommend him to defer the study of Chapter X. of this work, until he has mastered the first three chapters of " How to Parse."

Contents

PAGE

Comparative Table of Pages, English and American Editions xv

■. '. '. '. 7. ; : : : :

Chapter I. Nouns

1. Tell roe the names of some persons ; such as John, Mary.

2. Tell me the names of some places ; such as London, Middlesex, England.

3. Tell me the names of some things that you can see, feel, hear, or smell ; such as apples, soldiers, cat, sky, air, thunder, gas.

*4. Tell me the names of some groups of persons or things ; such as class, family, crowd, flock, herd.

Exercise I.

* Write or repeat four names of (1) boys; (2) girls ; (3) places ; (4) rivers ; (5) public buildings ; (6) dogs ; (7) horses ; (8) other animals ; etc.

Write or repeat four names of (1) things good to eat ; (2) parts of a house ; (3) parts of the body ;

(4) parts of a tree ; (5) parts of a book ; (6) parts of a ship ; (7) things used for writing ; (8) tools used by a gardener ; (9) by a carpenter, etc.

* Write or repeat as many names as you can of groups of (1) boys or girls ; (2) soldiers ; (3) other persons ; (4) animals ; (5) trees ; (6) houses ; (7) books ; etc.

5. Now look at this piece of chalk. What sort of a thing is it ? It is white, solid, rough or smooth, useful, small or large. All these words tell us the qualities of the chalk {quality means ' of what sort ') : well, I want names of these qualities ; give me them : whiteness^ solidness or solidity, roughness or smoothness, usefulness or utility, smallness, largeness.

You cannot see usefidness, but usefulness is the name of a quality of the chalk.

6. Tell me some more names of the qualities of things, such as weight, beauty.

7. Tell me some names of the qualities of persons : (a) good qualities or virtues, such as gentleness, honesty, justice, temperance; (b) bad qualities or vices, such as harshness, cruelty, dishonesty, injustice, intemperance, untruthfulness.

8. Tell me some names of (a) the feelings of your body, such as hunger, (b) the feelings of your mind, such as joy, hope, pity.

9. Tell me some names of actions ; such ^jumping, running, reading, counting, singing.

Exercise II.

Write or repeat six names of (1) actions ; (2) feelings of your mind ; (3) good qualities of persons ;

(4) bad qualities of persons ; (5) qualities of coal ; (6) ail*; (7) India-rubber; (8) snow; (9) paper; (10) hair; (11) steel; (12) water.

10. How shall we call all these names? If we call them " names," people will think we mean none but names of persons ; but we mean names of places, of things, of faults, actions, etc., as well. So we will call them Nouns, which is another word for Names. ( x )

Exercise III.

Point out the Nouns in —

Some thoughtless boys were playing with stones near a pond. During their play they noticed a family of frogs and began to pelt them, not out of cruelty, for /they were not cruel, but out of thoughtlessness. Very soon they hit one of the frogs, and all the family at once dived down in a fright beneath the surface of the water. " This is fine fun," said the boys, " we will wait till they come up again, and then we will give them a good pelting." Just then the mother of the frogs popped up her hec A croaking so pitifully that the boys held their hand* " Young gentlemen," said s. gentle you will not continue 1 you like it if a giant killed y — __ of sport? But that is what you have done to me ; you have killed my youngest daughter, and maimed my two sons for life. What is sport to you is death to us."

11. Sometimes you may be puzzled about Nouns. You may not see, for example, that pelting in the Exercise above is the name of an action, and so you may not know that it is a Noun. So here is a good way to find whether a word is a Noun or not, —

12. If a word (sometimes with ' a ' or ' the ' before 'it') can come after "I like," or " dislike, " to answer the question, " What do you like?" it is a Noun. ( 2 )

13. Thus you can say, " I like apples, Thomas, nothing, a walk, the country, jumping / " but you cannot say, " I like quickly;" so quickly is not a Noun. Of course, you must be careful to see how a word is used in the Exercise, before you say it is a Noun. For example, " playing" might sometimes be a Noun, as in "I like playing," but it is clearly not a Noun in the first line of the Exercise above, because it is not there used as a Name.

How to make Nouns.

14. Sometimes you can make Nouns out of other words that are not Nouns. For example, slow is not a Noun ; but you can make a Noun out of it, ■ — slowness. High is not a Noun ; but you can make a. Noun out of it, — height.

Exercise IV.

Make Nouns out of the following words : swift, broad, glad, long, deep, careless, narrow, wide, ready, obstinate, persevere, just, humble, pious, brave, repent.

* Kinds of Nouns.

* 15. Look carefully at the first two Nouns in the following sentence : —

" Charles is the oldest son of the family. "

Charles and son, you see, are simply different names for the same person ; but they are also different hinds of names.

(1) Charles is the name of a particular person, that is, of an individual. The name may be said to belong to Charles, to be peculiarly his own. Hence, it is called a Proper Noun. {Proper means 4 one's own/ as m property, appropriate.)

(2) Son is a name common to Charles and all his brothers ; indeed, to all boy-children. It is the name of every one of a class. Hence, it is called a Common Noun.

* 16. Tell the difference between (1) Helen, (2) girl; (1) London, (2) city; (1) Ponto, (2) dog;

(1) Racer, (2) horse ; (1) Hudson, (2) river; (1) State-House, (2) building; (1) Post- Office, (2) house.

Model. — (1) Helen is the name of a particular girl: it is her proper (her own) name. Therefore it is a Proper Noun.

(2) Girl is the name, not only of Helen, but of all other girls : it is common to them all. Therefore it is a Common Noun.

(i) A Proper Noun is a name peculiar or proper to an individual.

(2) A Common Noun is a name common to a class.

* 17. But the sentence has a third Noun, family. It means Charles and his brothers (and, perhaps, some other persons) taken together, spoken of as a group. Hence, it is called a Collective Noun. (Collective means c taken together.')

* 18. Tell the difference between the Nouns in each of the following phrases : —

(1) A bevy of girls ; (2) a pack of wolves ; (3) an army of ants ; (4) a herd of buffaloes ; (5) a flock of sheep; (6) a brood of chickens; (7) a clump of bushes ; (8) a bunch of grapes ; (9) a row of houses.

(3) A Collective Noun is the name of a number of objects taken together, the name of a group.

N.B. — An object is anything of which we can think, something thrown in the way of om minds.

* 19. Once more, " Charles" is said to be " the oldest son " ; and oldest tells us of a quality of Charles's. [§ 5] What is its name? age? But when we give this quality a name, we think of it as abstracted (that is, taken away) from Charles. Hence, it is called an Abstract Noun. So, names of feelings [§ 8], of actions [§ 9], and of some other things, help us to think of the feelings, etc., as taken away from the persons who feel, act, etc. ; and they, too, are hence called Abstract Nouns.

(4) An Abstract Noun is the name of a quality, feeling, action, etc., thought of as abstracted, or taken away, from the object to which it belongs.

* 20. Tell the difference between the Nouns in each of the following sentences : —

(1) The weight of the lead broke the scales.

(3) The laughing of the knot of boys was heard in the school-roOm.

(4) The ill-health of the master gave the school a holiday.

* Exercise V.

* Tell the kind of each Noun in Exercise III. and in —

At the time of Braddock's defeat, an Indian chief named Pontiac had seen the red- coats running away before his own men. Being a man of great courage and skill, he laid a plan to unite all the tribes of his race, and to drive the English out of America. First he tried to take Detroit, which was then only a fort ; but he failed, and his conspiracy broke down. Soon after, he was murdered by another Indian in a drunken frolic.

* Exercise VI.

Write this story again in } r our own words, being careful to use some Nouns of each kind.

21. A Noun is a name of any kind. ( 8 )

N.B. — A Noun is not a thing, but the name of a thing. A cow is not a Noun ; but the word u cow" is a Noun.

Chapter II. Pronouns

22. It would take up a great deal of time and would be very confusing if, whenever we wished to speak of ourselves or other people or things, we were obliged to repeat the Noun each time. For example, if your name were John, and you were speaking to a second person named James, about a third person named Thomas, it would be inconvenient to say, "When John saw Thomas, Thomas told John that James said James was coming to see John." What will you say instead of this? Will you not sa} r , "When I saw Thomas, he told me that you said you were coming to see me " ?

23. Again, take up a book. Tell me something about the book. You will not go on repeating " the book is heavy, the book belongs to me." What word will you use for ' the book ' ? Will it not be ' it ' ? Or, if you are speaking about more books than one, you will not go on repeating the books. What word will you use instead? Will it not be ' they ' or ' them ' ?

24. You see, then, that these words J, you, he, etc., are used instead of or for nouns, and we therefore call them Pronouns {Pro means for or instead of).

25. Words used for Nouns are called Pronouns.

Pronouns. 9

26. The Pronouns may be arranged as follows : —

(1) Pronouns denoting the Person speaking : I, me, we, us, myself, ourselves.

(2) Pronouns denoting the Person spoken to: you, yourself, yourselves / in Old English, thou, thee, thyself, ye, — forms still used in poetry and (once in a while) elsewhere.

(3) Pronouns denoting (a) the Person spoken of: he, him, himself she, her, herself they, them, themselves, (b) The thing spoken of: it, itself, they, them, themselves.

*27. These words are called -Persona? Pronouns, because 'person' once meant u an actor's part in a play," and these pronouns denote " the part played in conversation." They are (as arranged above) of the First, the Second or the Third Person.

* 28. Personal Pronouns that end in -self or -selves are called Reflexive Pronouns, (Reflexive means 'bent back'), because they refer to a person already named by another Pronoun; as in, " ./will do it myself," "he struck himself," " speak {you) for yourself" ( 4 )

Exercise VII.

Put Pronouns for the italicized Nouns in the following : —

Once an ass dressed an ass in the skin of a lion. On seeing the ass thus disguised, all the beasts of the forest fled away in fear, thinking the ass to be a lion, and fearing that the ass would devour the beasts. The fox alone did not run away, but hid the fox behind a tree, to note what went on. When the ass thought the ass was alone, the ass could not help braying with delight to see the beasts all so frightened at the ass. On this the sly fox stepped from behind the tree and said to the ass, " Now the fox has (have) found the ass out. If the ass had only kept quiet, every one would have taken the ass for a lion."