English Grammar, including the principles of grammatical analysis

What it is about

A British school grammar of the 1870s. It treats English as a historical language, with a long chapter on the principles of grammatical analysis: how to split a sentence into subject, predicate, object, complement and adjuncts, and how to show clauses in a bracket-and-line notation. The text here is an automatic OCR of the Internet Archive scan, so some words are garbled. There are no quantitative results; the book is a grammar and its analysis is by hand. The part read closely is the section "Analysis of Sentences" (the two-stage split of a simple sentence) and the notation for substantive and adverbial clauses.

Ideas

• I1. Mason's first stage of analysis separates the grammatical subject with its attributive adjuncts from the predicate-verb with its objects and adjuncts. Turn this into a check on UD trees: for each sentence in UD EWT dev, take the nsubj subtree and the root subtree and count how often the split is clean. Measure in tools/roundtrip and run twice.
• I2. Mason draws substantive clauses with a thick line and adverbial clauses with a dotted line under the sentence. Use this as a rendering option for the tree explanation in en/src/parse.rs, so that a user sees why a clause is treated as its head's argument or modifier.
• I3. The examination papers at the end of the book are a source of test sentences with known analyses. Put a held-out set of them (not used in any tuning) in the school tests and score en/src/parse.rs on it, with a shuffled-word negative control.

For Mova

The chapters to compare are languages/en/21-clause-structure.md, languages/en/23-complementation.md and languages/en/25-relative-clauses.md. The code is en/src/parse.rs (UD arcs), tools/roundtrip (tree to frames and back) and world/src/knowledge.rs for the school tests. Measures: the clean-split rate of I1 on EWT dev, and the accuracy of I3 against the held-out test, checked twice for identical output.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@book{mason1877english,
  title = {{English Grammar, including the principles of grammatical analysis}},
  author = {Mason, Charles Peter},
  year = {1877},
  url = {https://archive.org/details/englishgrammarin00masouoft}
}