Preview

Jespersen's views on the logic of English language

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
748 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Jespersen's views on the logic of English language
Otto Jespersen's view on logic of the English language

No language is logical in every respect, and we must not expect usage to be guided always by strictly logical principles. It was a frequent error with the older- grammarians that whenever the actual grammar of a language did not seem conformable to the rules of abstract logic they blamed the language and wanted to correct it. Without falling into that error we may, nevertheless, compare different languages and judge them by the standard of logic, and here again Jespersen thinks that, apart from Chinese, which has been described as pure applied logic, there is perhaps no language in the civilized world that stands so high as English.

Look at the use of the tenses; the difference between the past he saw and the composite perfect he has seen is maintained with great consistency as compared with the similarly formed tenses in Danish, not to speak of German, so that one of the most constant faults committed by English-speaking Germans is the wrong use of these forms ('Were you in Berlin?' for 'Have you been in (or to) Berlin?', 'In 181 5 Napoleon has been defeated at Waterloo' for 'was defeated'). And then the comparatively recent development of the extended (or 'progressive') tenses has furnished the language with the wonderfully precise and logically valuable distinction between 'I write' and 'I am writing', 'I wrote' and 'I was writing'. French has something similar in the distinction between le pass6 defini (j'ecrivis) and I'imparfait (j'6crivais), but on the one hand the former tends to disappear, or rather has already disappeared in the spoken language, at any rate in Paris and in the northern part of the country, so that fai ecrit takes its place and the distinction between 'I wrote' and 'I have written' is abandoned; on the other hand the distinction applies only to the past while in English it is carried through all tenses. Furthermore, the distinction as made in English is superior to the

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Satisfactory Essays

    Written in 1975, Kathleen Jamieson's "Antecedent Genre as Rhetorical Constraint" declares that discourse is determined by the Rhetorical Situation, as well as antecedent genres. Antecedent genres are genres of the past that are used as a basis to shape and form current rhetorical responses. When placed in an unprecedented situation, a rhetor can draw on antecedent genres of similar situations in order to guide their response. However, caution should be taken when drawing on antecedent genres because sometimes antecedent genres are capable of imposing powerful constraints (Jamieson 414). The intent of antecedent genres are to guide the rhetor toward a response consistent…

    • 324 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    English 1101: My Analysis

    • 318 Words
    • 2 Pages

    I have learned many things while attended English 1101. I have learned that I can improve in writing, which I never thought possible. Although I still need a lot of work I feel I have improved. I never wrote essays in high school because I switched schools all the time. I used to completely hate writing essays, but now depending on the type of essay I actually enjoy it.…

    • 318 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Today I am going to talk about the Logic of nonstandard English written by W.Labov. In older days, with the help of the government, there are a lot of researches about the education problems of the children in the ghetto areas. Ghetto means a city which Jews lived or which members of a minority group live , isolated group. Most of the psychologists try to figure out the needs of education from poorly environment. This paper use example as Negro people. Most of the psychologists said that the problems occur bcoz of the verbal deprivation( they said Negro children from ghetto areas have very little verbal stimulation so they cannot speak complete sentences don’t know the names of the common objects and cannot think of concepts)…

    • 1488 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Mill's Inductive Reasoning

    • 1586 Words
    • 7 Pages

    Mill, J. S., (2002). A System of Logic: Ratiocinative and Inductive. University Press of the Pacific.…

    • 1586 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Grice, P. H. (1975). Logic and Conversation. In: P. Cole and J. Morgan (eds.). Syntax and Semantics vol. 3: Speech Acts. pp.41~58. New York: Academic Press…

    • 815 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Mosser, K. (2011). An introduction to logic. San Diego, CA: Bridgepoint Education, Inc. Retrieved from https://content.ashford.edu.…

    • 973 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    “Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously” is a sentence created by Noam Chomsky who is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, logician, social critic, political activist, and sometimes described as ‘’ the father of modern linguistics”, Chomsky is also an important figure in analytic philosophy. “Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously” is a significant sentence related to syntactic structure which is grammatically correct, however, semantically nonsensical. It demonstrates that a sentence can be grammatically correct, but semantically nonsensical. According to Chomsky language is infinite, with no end to the number of probable sentences that people can produce and comprehend. In this paper, “Colorless Green…

    • 997 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    A more significant problem is the lack of correspondence between the tenses in which certain meanings are expressed in Dutch and the tenses in which those meanings are expressed in English. For example, English requires the past simple where Dutch uses the present perfect or the present perfect where Dutch uses the present simple. Mistakes such as the following are common: I…

    • 654 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Structuralism is a mode of thinking and a method of analysis practiced in 20th-century social sciences and humanities; it focuses on recurring patterns of thought and behaviour – it seeks to analyse social relationships in terms of highly abstract relational structures. Structuralism is distinctly different from that applied to Radcliffe-Brown – it involves more the bio and psychological aspect of human studies rather than social structures. Claude Levi-Strauss was the one to pioneer structuralism; he suggested that cultural phenomena such as myths, art, kinship systems and language display certain ordered patterns or structures. With these, he believed that the structure of the human mind could be revealed. He reasoned that behind the surface of individual cultures there must exist natural properties common to us all: innate structures universal to all man. Levi-Strauss focused his attention on the patterns or structures existing beneath the customs and beliefs of all cultures.…

    • 645 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    By this short response, I would like to express my thoughts about the poem “Discourse on the Logic of Language” By M. NourbeSe Philip and about the essay “The transformation of silence into language and action” by Audre Lorde.…

    • 673 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Theoretical Grammar

    • 3444 Words
    • 14 Pages

    The most general meanings rendered by language and expressed by systemic correlations of word-forms are interpreted in linguistics as categorial grammatical meanings. The forms rendering these meanings are identified within definite paradigmatic series.…

    • 3444 Words
    • 14 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    English is an incarnate language—I accept this fact wholeheartedly. There is probably a good reason we are not discovering the Urdu slang for "#swag" or "LOL": the language is dead ( for some ), definitely spoken but no longer changing. To be honest, based on those two words, I would endeavor to guess that Urdu is grateful to be dead for the ubiquitous some and the youth . Even in a bizarre scenario, where languages had an afterlife, I bet Urdu would be brutally tortured for eternity, surrounded by hellfire and brimstone , and the entire time it would grin as the demons gnawed at it thinking, "Well, Booyah! atleast no one is using me to say ‘# IKR.’" ( I know right ! Imagine that ? )…

    • 971 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Logical Framework Approach

    • 2042 Words
    • 9 Pages

    In the introductory course mention has been made of the Logical Framework. In this course we revisit…

    • 2042 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Best Essays

    Contrastive Linguistics

    • 4609 Words
    • 19 Pages

    References: Aijmer, Karin, Bengt Altenberg and Mats Johansson (eds.) (1996). Languages in contrast. Papers from a symposium on text-based cross-linguistic studies, Lund 4-5 March 1994. Lund Studies in English 88. Lund: Lund University Press. Declerck, Renaat (2006). The grammar of the English verb phrase, Vol. 1. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Fries, Charles Carpenter (1945). Teaching and learning English as a foreign language. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Granger, Sylviane (1998). Learner English on Computer. London: Longman. Haspelmath, Martin (1993). Indefinites. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Haspelmath, Martin (2008). Comparative concepts and descriptive categories in crosslinguistic studies. Ms. Hawkins, John (1986). A comparative typology of English and German. Unifying the contrasts. London: Croom Helm.…

    • 4609 Words
    • 19 Pages
    Best Essays
  • Best Essays

    The English language and German language are two of the most popular languages spoken across the globe. English is the 3rd most popular language in the entire world with roughly 365 million speakers. German has a total of 92 million native speakers, with about another 80 million that know German as their second language. There are 88 sovereign states in total where English is considered an official language including India, United Kingdom, Pakistan, and the United States. Whereas for German, there are six sovereign states that count German as an official language, that list includes Germany, Belgium, and Austria. German and English languages are apart of the same Indo- European language family. The goal of this paper is to deeply look into and study the differences between the German and English grammar.…

    • 1932 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Best Essays