Inhaltsangabe
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1918. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER II THE SENTENCE: GRAMMAR As the paragraph is the unit of the whole composition, the sentence is the unit of the paragraph. And the qualities of unity, clearness, and emphasis that are to be aimed at in constructing paragraphs must also be sought in constructing sentences. But a sentence must, first of all, be grammatically correct. Popular judgment of a man's education depends chiefly on his grammar, and no matter how fine an engineer or tactician he may be, if he speaks and writes ungrammatically he is classed as an uneducated man. The ideal way of mastering the grammar of a language is to be brought up to the sound of it so that correct use becomes instinctive; but slovenly habits of speech are so common and so contagious that practically everyone needs to keep a sharp eye on his verbs, adverbs, and pronouns. In this chapter we shall have space for only the commonest of these grammatical mistakes. First, however, we should note the fact that English grammar is more a matter of word position than inflectional endings. In fact, English has lost so many of its old noun and verb endings that it has even been called the " grammarless " language. It has lost nearly all of those distinctions of genders and declensions and conjugations that perplex the beginner in French or German. In place of these endings English has a simple word order--subject, predicate, and object. This fact makes the position of a word most important in English, whereas in Latin, for example, it is the ending of the word, not its position, that tells its grammatical business in the sentence. For instance, in Latin one may write, Brutus necavit Casarem, or Brutus Casarem necavit, or Ccesarem Brutus, necavit; in any case the meaning will be, " Brutus killed Caesar." But in English ...
Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.
