Pronouns. For further remarks on this point the reader is referred to §§ 128-172 of the present work. I am glad to find my classification sanctioned by so high an authority as that of Mr. Morell, who in his recently published English Grammar adopts the same division:* he also agrees with me in setting down the article, not as a distinct part of speech, but as a demonstrative adjective.

In dealing with the verb, I have discarded the potential mood, for reasons given in § 186. The only fragments of it which really indicate mood (namely the combinations of should and would with the infinitive mood) may be classed under the subjunctive mood. If" I shall write" is an indicative future, there is no reason why "I should write" should not be called a subjunctive future. It is then unnecessary to invent a conditional mood, as most French and some German grammarians do. It also obviates the necessity for calling the same tense both past and future (as Mr. Morell does). The scheme of tenses which I have adopted is not an invention of my own; it will be found in an admirable fragment of a Greek grammar, printed many years ago, by Professor Malden (of Univ. Coll., London), and in Professor Key's Latin Grammar. It agrees in its main features with the classification of all the best modern grammarians. It is simpler, more exact, and in every way better than such awkward, ambiguous, and unmeaning terms as pluperfect, prior perfect, progressive forms, first future, second future, with which most English grammars abound. The crotchety dictum, that the English verb has only two tenses, is rejected for the reasons stated in p. 35. The comparative table of tenses in English, Latin, Greek, German, and French will be found of great service. The necessity for the recognition of a gerund in English is shown in §§ 97, 200. Some other details will be found, in which it is hoped an improvement has been effected.

The adverb is a part of speech which has suffered much ill usage at the hands of grammarians. Its domain has been very

The coincidence between Mr. Morell's Grammar and my own, in this and some other innovations, is curious, as the results have been arrived at quite independently. My own work was complete, and partly in use, before Mr. Morell's Grammar was published.

improperly restricted, and many words which are genuine adverbs in their relation to verbs, adjectives, and other adverbs, have been set down as mere conjunctions. In the classification which I have adopted, I have merely, endeavoured to apply carefully the acknowledged truth, that a word which indicates any of the conditions of time, place, manner, degree, cause, or circumstance under which an attributive notion is connected with an object of thought, is an adverb. Some will perhaps demur at first to the truth of the statement that such words as than, as, therefore, &c. are adverbs. Before they finally reject it, however, they should examine and compare what is said in §§ 260, 264, 266, 267, 292, 408, with the examples of the analysis of compound and elliptical sentences.*

In treating of conjunctions, I have ventured upon a new classification. In a note on § 286, enough has been said to justify the disuse of the stupid old names, copulative conjunctions and disjunctive conjunctions, the former of which involves an unmeaning tautology, while the latter is simply self-contradictory. The division into co-ordinative and subordinative conjunctions has at least the advantage of being based upon a well-established classification of compound sentences, of exhibiting structural distinctions which the old-fashioned division obliterates, and of presenting the only distinction which really has a grammatical import.t

The syntactical portion of the present work derives many of

* Mr. Morell admits that why, wherefore, when, where, &c., are adverbs when used interrogatively, but seems to question the propriety of their being called adverbs in clauses which are not interrogative. It is not easy to see on what principle such a distinction can be defended. When indicates the time of an

event quite as much in the one case as in the other. Besides, the interrogative force does not really reside in the words where, wherefore, &c., but in the structure and use of the clause in which they occur (see p. 94). If wherefore is an adverb in an interrogative scntence, it is an adverb in every sentence; for the definition of an adverb will equally apply to it. And if wherefore is an adverb, the demonstrative therefore is also an adverb.

Mr. Morell has retained the terms copulative and disjunctive, subdividing the copulative conjunctions into connective and continuative, and the disjunctive into distributive and adversative. This appears to me to be needlessly complex, independently of the objections urged above. The subdivisions connective and continuative involve an obscure indication of the classification which I have adopted. In §§ 292, 408, 409, I have given reasons for excluding from the list of conjunctions many words which Mr. Morell has included.

its leading features from the principles developed by Becker in his German Grammar. The publication of that work may well be regarded as an epoch in the history of grammatical science. Its leading doctrines are incontrovertibly sound and philosophical, though the same unqualified praise is by no means to be bestowed on the details of their development. The latter abound in capricious distinctions and arbitrary generalizations. The outlines of Becker's system were presented in a very imperfect and unsatisfactory manner by the late Rev. T. K. Arnold, in his “English Grammar for Classical Schools; " but the merit of first giving a full and accurate exposition of Becker's principles, as applied to English Grammar, unquestionably belongs to Mr. Morell, whose "Analysis of Sentences" has met with great and well-deserved success. I had at first thought that any further attempt in the same direction would be superfluous, but a closer examination of the subject convinced me that some important alterations were necessary, not so much in the mode in which Becker's system had been applied to the English language by Mr. Morell, as in some subordinate but important parts of the system itself.

Becker divides words into words that express notions, and words that express the relations of notions to each other. Notions he subdivides into notions of things that exist (expressed by substantives), and notions of the actions or activities* of the latter (expressed by adjectives and verbs). This distribution I have disregarded, because so much of it as is true is too vague to be of any use; and because the idea that in the words a red rose, red expresses an activity or action of the rose, is a metaphysical subtlety, questionable in itself, and quite unintelligible to a young learner. A fortiori, I have passed by Becker's intricate analysis of the various relations of these activities to some existing thing, or to the speaker. If I might be so bold, I should pronounce the greater portion of it to be little better than rubbish.

Becker distinguishes three relations in which words stand to each other:-1. the Predicative; 2. the Attributive; 3. the Objective. About the first two of these there is no difficulty. In place of the third, I have substituted two separate relations,— the Objective Relation and the Adverbial Relation. In Becker's system, the term object is applied not only to what is commonly

* Thätigkeiten.

understood as the object of a verb, but also to the circumstances of time, place, manner, and causality, which are connected with the action. The first sort of object he calls the object that completes the predicate, the second sort the object that extends the predicate. There are several difficulties involved in this. It is a most arbitrary and unnatural use of the grammatical term object, to say that the place, the manner, nay even the cause of an action, is an object of the action (see Morell, Analysis, § LIII). Again, the distinction drawn between completing the predicate and extending it will not bear examination. In such sentences

66

as "He strikes the ball," "He runs across the meadow," the verb strikes expresses the action referred to at least as completely as the verb runs; and the phrase across the meadow" quite as much completes the notion in the latter case as the word ball does in the former.* It is therefore better to keep the term object for that which is commonly understood by it in grammar, namely, the word that stands for that upon which the action denoted by a transitive verb is exerted, and to treat the adverbial relation (or what Becker calls the extending object) as something altogether distinct. Becker's arrangement becomes perfectly absurd when we apply it to the case of an adverb qualifying an adverb. In "He writes very well," very certainly stands in some relation to well; and as that is neither the predicative nor the attributive, it must be the objective,-the same relation as that in which ball stands to strikes, in the sentence given above! Mr. Morell (Analysis, § LVI.) overtly classes adverbs among the words that signify action. I confess I do not understand the kind of action which is denoted by words like yesterday, now, here, &c.; and I am quite sure that if a young learner thought he understood it, the notion which he would have in his mind would be something very wide of the truth.

It would puzzle any one to deduce from Becker's work a distinct and accurate definition of the predicate of a sentence. The style in which the matter is dealt with may be judged of by the fact, that he classes the verb be and the auxiliary verbs with pronouns,

* Becker himself allows this, in a passage which contradicts his own classifi

cation.

numerals, prepositions, and adverbs, under one head as relational words. Mr. Morell's account of the matter (Analysis, § VI.) is far superior in accuracy and clearness. In § 347 of the present work I have suggested a still further simplification, for which I have given my reasons in a note. One advantage that will follow from its admission will be that we shall be able to get rid of a difficulty, which, if not quietly ignored (as is often the case in systems of grammatical analysis), is sure to lead to an anomaly. If, in the sentence He is rich, rich is the predicate, and is the copula, why, in the sentence He becomes rich, should we not call becomes the copula? The notion of becoming has quite as good a right to be considered copulative as the notion of being. The difficulty is removed, and the anomaly obviated, when we regard neither be nor become as a copula, but treat them both as verbs of incomplete predication (see § 392). And now ensues another advantage from discarding Becker's use of the term completion of the predicate, as applied to the object of a transitive verb. We can apply it, or some equivalent term, in the case of verbs which really do express only an incomplete notion. To avoid confusion, I have adopted the term complement instead of completion.

In the treatment of compound sentences, the chief modifications that I have introduced, as compared with Mr. Morell's Analysis, are the arrangement of co-ordinate and subordinate sentences as subdivisions of compound sentences (which is, in fact, Becker's mode of classifying them), the recognition of what I have termed collateral sentences, and a more thorough investigation of the construction of adverbial and elliptical sentences.

The etymological portion of the book is the result of an independent examination of the vocabulary of the language, as given in Richardson's and Webster's Dictionaries. The appendix has been added, not because its contents fall strictly within the province of grammar, but because it will be useful to the learner, and I did not know to what source to direct him for an equally complete list. I have not given a list of Anglo-Saxon roots, because, as AngloSaxon is rarely studied by those for whom this grammar is chiefly

*Arnold does so. He terms it a strengthened copula, a name which he also applies to seem, be made, be called, &c. Analysis becomes a very vague affair when we are driven to such a pass as this.