[Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/murray-1795-english-grammar-adapted-different/)

[home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [docs](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/) / [papers](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/) / [English](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/en/) / English Grammar, Adapted to the Different Classes of Learners, with an Appendix

# English Grammar, Adapted to the Different Classes of Learners, with an Appendix

**Authors:** Lindley Murray · **Year:** 1795 (text: 1826 edition) · **Venue:** York (1795 first edition); this copy from the 1826 edition **Link:** [archive.org/details/englishgrammarad00murrrich](https://archive.org/details/englishgrammarad00murrrich) · **Licence:** [public domain](https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/) (author died 1826; published before 1931 in the US)

grammar-book[licence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindley_Murray)

- [Publisher's page](https://archive.org/details/englishgrammarad00murrrich)
- [PDF](https://archive.org/download/englishgrammarad00murrrich/englishgrammarad00murrrich_bw.pdf)

**Authors (1)**

1. Lindley Murray

Citations and author metrics from OpenAlex (); authors with the same name are not always told apart.

## What it is about

The most widely used prescriptive school grammar of the nineteenth century. It has four parts: orthography, etymology, syntax and prosody. The syntax part defines a simple sentence as one with a single finite verb and a compound sentence as two or more joined by a connective, then gives "rules of syntax" with examples of correct and faulty construction, and a note on the preposition separated from its relative ("Whom wilt thou give it to?"), which the book treats as a point of usage. The rules are written as agreement and government statements, and the observations after them name errors to avoid. The book has no measurements; its value for us is as a fixed list of claimed rules and of errors that were taught as errors.

## Ideas

- I1. Turn each "rule of syntax" with its example pair (the form the book condemns and the form it prefers) into a test for the parser: the condemned sentence should get a flag, the preferred one should not. Report which rules the parser can check at all.
- I2. Use the prescriptive rules as a register marker, not as truth: a rule that is still disputed (for example the "Whom" rule) gets a note in [37. Register and variation](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/37-register-and-variation/), and the tagger keeps the form without a penalty.
- I3. Use the clause definitions of the syntax part (simple, compound, the three kinds of simple sentence) as a check on the clause-type labeller, the same test as the one for Nesfield.

## For Mova

The chapters are [26. Questions](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/26-questions/) (for "Whom wilt thou" and preposition stranding), [24. Coordination and subordination](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/24-coordination-subordination/) and [37. Register and variation](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/37-register-and-variation/). The code is `en/src/parse.rs` for the flag and `tools/treeagree check` for gate-style checks. Measure: the flag rate on the faulty and correct example sets, run twice, with the preferred sentences as the negative control: their flag rate must be near zero, or the rule is a plain "always yes".

## Cite

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

```
@book{murray1795english,
  title = {{English Grammar, Adapted to the Different Classes of Learners, with an Appendix}},
  author = {Murray, Lindley},
  year = {1795},
  url = {https://archive.org/details/englishgrammarad00murrrich}
}
```

- [← previous Grammatical theory: From transformational grammar to constraint-based approaches](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/muller-2023-grammatical-theory-from-transformational/)
- [next → A POS Tagging Model Designed for Learner English](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/nagata-2018-pos-tagging-model-adapted-learner/)
- [↑ back to English](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/en/)