Herb,

It is a pleasure to see in action an accomplished linguist such as Jespersen, who understands that the language exists as the product of those who speak it, who observes carefully, and who reports on actual language practices as exemplified by celebrated practitioners. Compare that with our resident fanatic, who considers himself a language dictator and who reports on the practices of our most eminent writers and linguists only so he can pronounce them to be in violation of his peculiar dictates.

Dick


On Sat, Apr 11, 2009 at 10:12 PM, STAHLKE, HERBERT F <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

I sent Brad as an attachment a copy of Jespersen’s Chapter 6 of his third Syntax volume of A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles.  He excerpted it pretty minimally below, and I thought the full text might be interesting to some on the list as a nuanced treatment of the pluperfect.  The text follows.  This is scanned OCR text that I have edited to correct OCR errors and formatted to be close to the original.

 

Herb


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