Окончил Копенгагенский университет, затем продолжал образование в Оксфордском университете. В 1893—1925 годах — профессоранглийского языка в Копенгагенском университете.

Автор учебника английского языка (1895, выдержал 19 изданий), в основу которого положена живая разговорная речь. Своё пониманиеграмматики как живого и развивающегося целого он отразил в «Философии грамматики» (1924). Есперсен — автор «теории прогресса» в языке, согласно которой все языковые изменения направлены на облегчение условий коммуникации и потому прогрессивны. Создал проект международного искусственного языка новиаль, ранее участвовал в разработке идо.

Работы Есперсена оказали значительное влияние на развитие лингвистики XX века. Способствовал становлению датской лингвистической школы (среди его учеников, в частности, Луис Леонор Хаммерих).

Отто Есперсен исследовал «Великий сдвиг гласных» и дал явлению это имя.

В 1938 году опубликовал автобиографию «Жизнь одного лингвиста» (дат. En sprogmands levned).

was born in Randers in Jutland. He was inspired by the work of Danish philologist Rasmus Rask as a boy, and with the help of Rask's grammars taught himself some Icelandic, Italian, and Spanish.[1] He entered the University of Copenhagen in 1877 when he was 17, initially studying law but not forgetting his language studies. In 1881 he shifted his focus completely to languages, [2] and in 1887 earned his master's degree in French, with English and Latin as his secondary languages. He supported himself during his studies through part-time work as a schoolteacher and as a shorthand reporter in the Danish parliament. In 1887–1888, he traveled to England, Germany and France, meeting linguists like Henry Sweet and Paul Passy and attending lectures at institutions like Oxford University. Following the advice of his mentor Vilhelm Thomsen, he returned to Copenhagen in August 1888 and began work on his doctoral dissertation on the English case system. He successfully defended his dissertation in 1891.

Academic life and work[edit source | editbeta]

Jespersen was a professor of English at the University of Copenhagen from 1893 to 1925, and served as Rector of the university in 1920–21. His early work focused primarily on language teaching reform and on phonetics, but he is best known for his later work on syntax and on language development.

He advanced the theories of Rank and Nexus in Danish in two papers: Sprogets logik (1913) and De to hovedarter af grammatiske forbindelser(1921). Jespersen in this theory of ranks removes the parts of speech from the syntax, and differentiates between primaries, secondaries, and tertiaries; e.g. in "well honed phrase," "phrase" is a primary, this being defined by a secondary, "honed", which again is defined by a tertiary "well". The term Nexus is applied to sentences, structures similar to sentences and sentences in formation, in which two concepts are

expressed in one unit; e.g., it rained, he ran indoors. This term is qualified by a further concept called a junction which represents one idea, expressed by means of two or more elements, whereas a nexus combines two ideas. Junction and nexus proved valuable in bringing the concept of context to the forefront of the attention of the world of linguistics.

He was most widely recognized for some of his books. Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin (1922) is considered by many to be his masterpiece.[3] Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles (1909–1949), concentrated on morphology and syntax, and Growth and Structure of the English Language (1905) is a comprehensive view of English by someone with another native language, and still in print, over 60 years after his death and more than 100 years after publication. Late in his life he published Analytic Syntax (1937), in which he presents his views on syntactic structure using an idiosyncratic shorthand notation. In The Philosophy of Grammar (1924) he challenged the accepted views of common concepts in Grammar and proposed corrections to the basic definitions of grammatical case, pronoun, object, voice etc., and developed further his notions ofRank and Nexus. In the 21st century this book is still used as one of the basic texts in modern Structural linguistics. Mankind, Nation and Individual: from a linguistic point of view (1925) is one of the pioneering works on Sociolinguistics.

Jespersen visited the United States twice: he lectured at the Congress of Arts and Sciences in St. Louis in 1904, and in 1909–1910 he visited both the University of California and Columbia University.[4] While in the U.S., he took occasion to study the country's educational system. His autobiography (see below) was published in English translation as recently as 1995.

Jespersen was a proponent of phonosemanticism and wrote: “Is there really much more logic in the opposite extreme which denies any kind ofsound symbolism (apart from the small class of evident echoisms and ‘onomatopoeia’) and sees in our words only a collection of accidental and irrational associations of sound and meaning? ...There is no denying that there are words which we feel instinctively to be adequate to express the ideas they stand for.”

After his retirement in 1925, Jespersen remained active in the international linguistic community. In addition to continuing to write, he convened and chaired the first International Meeting on Linguistic Research in Geneva in 1930, and acted as president of the Fourth International Congress of Linguists in Copenhagen in 1936.[5]

Jespersen was an important figure in the international language movement. He was an early supporter of the Esperanto offshoot Ido and in 1927 published his own project Novial. He also worked with the International Auxiliary Language Association.[6]

Jespersen received honorary degrees from Columbia University in New York (1910), St. Andrews University in Scotland (1925), and the Sorbonne in Paris (1927).[7] He was one of the first six international scholars to be elected as honorary members of the Linguistic Society of America.[8]

Charles Talbut Onions (C. T. Onions) (10 September 1873 – 8 January 1965) was an English grammarian and lexicographer and the fourth editor of the Oxford English Dictionary.

Born in Edgbaston, Birmingham, the son of a designer and embosser of metal, Onions early came under the influence of A. J. Smith, the headmaster of the King Edward VI Camp Hill School, where Onions received his first contact with lexicography.[1] He obtained a London BA in 1892 and an MA in 1895, both while attending Mason College, Birmingham.[2]

James Murray invited Onions to join the staff of the Oxford English Dictionary at Oxford in 1895, and in 1914 he began independent editorial work with his own assistants.[3] His Shakespeare Glossary was published in 1911, and in 1933 he co-edited the OED Supplement with William Craigie. Following the death of William Little in 1922, he assumed the editorship of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.

Onions served as a fellow and librarian of Magdalen College, Oxford. He was president of the Philological Society from 1929 to 1933 and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1938. On completion of the OED, the universities of Oxford, Leeds, and Birmingham conferred honorary degrees upon him. Onions was appointed a Commander of The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in 1934. In 1945 he succeeded R. W. Chambers as honorary director of the Early English Text Society and worked to extend its publishing program. He was editor of Medium Aevum, the journal of the Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature, from its inception in 1932 to 1956. Onions' last twenty years were largely devoted to completing The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (1966), which treated over 38,000 words and went to press just prior to his death.[4]

For much of his life, Onions suffered with a stutter. In 1907 he married Angela Blythman (1883– 1941), and they had seven sons and three daughters. During World War I, Onions served in British naval intelligence where his knowledge of German proved a significant asset.

George Oliver Curme, Sr. (January 14, 1860 – April 29, 1948) was an

American grammarian and philologist. He is best known for his Grammar of the German Language (1905, revised 1922), and A Grammar of the English Language (1931).

Curme received most of his education at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, and

the University of Michigan. He also did postgraduate work at the University of Berlin. His principal teaching posts were at Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa (1886–96), and Northwestern University inEvanston, Illinois (1896–1933). After his retirement from Northwestern, Curme taught from 1934 to 1939 at the University of Southern California.

Curme’s Grammar of the German Language is one of the best works in its field, among the books by non-Germans. His English grammars are classic rather than modernistic; they may be profitably consulted for detailed explanations and analyses.

But with the advent of the computer, the balance of power is shifting. That’s because the computer now makes it infinitely easier to track patterns of English usage and catalog them for use as reference material. Finally, the descriptivists have an empirical source of verbal ammunition: concrete examples of how the language is actually used.

The collection and study of millions of such examples of actual usage is known as corpus linguistics, a body of language. The idea of a corpus is nothing new. Samuel Johnson used a corpus of English texts in the 18th century to compile his dictionary, and linguists around the world have relied on corpora since the 1960'’ in their efforts to document hundreds of languages.

What is new is the computer, which allows much more expansive and detailed investigation into the language usage. If the field of corpus linguistics was once a bicycle, the computer has turned it into a motorcycle.

“Actually, it wasn’t even a bicycle before the computer,” says Susan Conrad, coauthor of “Corpus Linguistics: Investigating Language Structure and Use” and a professor of applied linguistics at Portland State University. “It was more like walking. It was just too time-consuming to analyze a large body of data by hand. The computer allows us to look at a large body of data and analyze language patterns.”

Computers not only make it possible to expand corpora to millions of words; they also can be programmed to act as something of a verbal spreadsheet. If so instructed, computers can identify every word in a corpus by its part of speech, its location in a sentence, the words that surround it and its meaning (for homographs and words with multiple definitions). Computers can distinguish between written and spoken English and can identify words by the age, sex and geographic region of their author or speaker.

Once of interest only to grammarians and textbook authors, corpora are increasingly useful to anybody with an interest in knowing what people actually say: authors, editors, playwrights, advertising copywriters, English teachers and even members of the Gotcha! Gang.

Maybe you’re the grammatically challenged singer-songwriter Joan Osborne, and you desperately want to know: What if God was one of us? Would he insist on using the unreal conditional tense (What if God were one of us?), or would he just let it slide because hardly anybody remembers this arcane rule?

“Businesses may be interested in corpora to see what technical language looks like,” says Randi Reppen, director of the intensive English program at Northern Arizona University. “They may want to learn how they can teach their employees to use language that is more common.”

Reppen is the project manager for the American National Corpus, a huge undertaking sponsored by a consortium of publishers, software companies and academics, including Pearson, Microsoft, Sony and the Universities of California, Colorado and Pennsylvania, among many others. When it is completed, the corpus will contain more than 100 million words, chosen from a broad selection of contemporary written and spoken texts – everything from books, magazines and newspapers to face-to- face conversations in drugstores and Laundromats t5hat have been recorded and transcribed by researchers. Based on a similar corpus of British English created in 1994, the American Corpus will provide a definitive portrait of how the English language is used in the United States today.

The first instalment of 10 million words is scheduled for release this fall and will be available to anybody with Internet access. Say, for example, you’re writing advertising copy, and you want to know whether most people still use “I couldn’t care less” or opt instead for the easier (but nonsensical) “I could care less.” You’ll simply hop on the Web, enter the phrase “could care less” and compare the number of hits. “You could choose to limit your search to spoken language or to newspapers or even to academic writing,” Reppen says.

Smaller-scale corpora are already shedding light on the English language, a development that the American National Corpus is sure to accelerate. For example, linguists have long known that people don’t edit themselves for grammar when they speak. But the University of Michigan’s Corpus of Academic spoken English also reveals that “um” and “uh” are the 14th and 15th most common utterances around Ann Arbor.

Corpus linguistics is also giving descriptivists the most powerful weapon of all the ability to thumb their noses at rules of grammar nobody uses any more. “Nobody owns the language,” Conrad says. “Most of these prescriptive rules are really arbitrary. Why not end a sentence with a preposition? It was just somebody writing a book who made that rule up.”