---
title: "English Grammar, including the principles of — Mason 1877"
description: "A British school grammar of the 1870s. It treats English as a historical language, with a long chapter on the principles of grammatical analysis: how to…"
authors: ["Charles Peter Mason"]
year: 1877
venue: "grammar-book"
source: "https://archive.org/details/englishgrammarin00masouoft"
licence: "All rights reserved"
licence_url: "https://archive.org/details/englishgrammarin00masouoft"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/mason-1877-english-grammar-including-principles/"
---
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# English Grammar, including the principles of grammatical analysis

**Authors:** Charles Peter Mason (enlarged and revised by W. Houston) · **Year:** 1877 · **Venue:** Toronto: Adam Miller and Co. (Canadian reprint of the enlarged edition; book on the Internet Archive) **Link:** [archive.org/details/englishgrammarin00masouoft](https://archive.org/details/englishgrammarin00masouoft) · **Licence:** [public domain](https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/) (author died 1900; published before 1931 in the US)

grammar-book · [licence](https://archive.org/details/englishgrammarin00masouoft)

- [Publisher's page](https://archive.org/details/englishgrammarin00masouoft)
- [PDF](https://archive.org/download/englishgrammarin00masouoft/englishgrammarin00masouoft.pdf)

**Authors (1)**

1. Charles Peter Mason

Citations and author metrics: OpenAlex, ; authors with the same name are not always told apart.

## What it is about

A British school grammar of the 1870s. It treats English as a historical language, with a long chapter on the principles of grammatical analysis: how to split a sentence into subject, predicate, object, complement and adjuncts, and how to show clauses in a bracket-and-line notation. The text here is an automatic OCR of the Internet Archive scan, so some words are garbled. There are no quantitative results; the book is a grammar and its analysis is by hand. The part read closely is the section "Analysis of Sentences" (the two-stage split of a simple sentence) and the notation for substantive and adverbial clauses.

## Ideas

- I1. Mason's first stage of analysis separates the grammatical subject with its attributive adjuncts from the predicate-verb with its objects and adjuncts. Turn this into a check on UD trees: for each sentence in UD EWT dev, take the `nsubj` subtree and the `root` subtree and count how often the split is clean. Measure in `tools/roundtrip` and run twice.
- I2. Mason draws substantive clauses with a thick line and adverbial clauses with a dotted line under the sentence. Use this as a rendering option for the tree explanation in `en/src/parse.rs`, so that a user sees why a clause is treated as its head's argument or modifier.
- I3. The examination papers at the end of the book are a source of test sentences with known analyses. Put a held-out set of them (not used in any tuning) in the school tests and score `en/src/parse.rs` on it, with a shuffled-word negative control.

## For Mova

The chapters to compare are [languages/en/21-clause-structure.md](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/21-clause-structure/), [languages/en/23-complementation.md](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/23-complementation/) and [languages/en/25-relative-clauses.md](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/25-relative-clauses/). The code is `en/src/parse.rs` (UD arcs), `tools/roundtrip` (tree to frames and back) and `world/src/knowledge.rs` for the school tests. Measures: the clean-split rate of I1 on EWT dev, and the accuracy of I3 against the held-out test, checked twice for identical output.

## Cite

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

```bibtex
@book{mason1877english,
  title = {{English Grammar, including the principles of grammatical analysis}},
  author = {Mason, Charles Peter},
  year = {1877},
  url = {https://archive.org/details/englishgrammarin00masouoft}
}
```

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