The Philosophy of Grammar

"My endeavor has been, without neglecting investigation into the details of the languages known to me, to give due prominence to the great principles underlying the grammars of all languages, and thus to make my contribution to a grammatical science based at the same time on sound psychology, on sane logic, and on solid facts of linguistic history," wrote the great linguistic scholar Otto Jesperson, when he made this important study forty years ago. He had become convinced of the necessity of studying language through the observation of living speech and only secondarily by examination of written documents.