ABSTRACT
THE following pages have been occasioned by the elaboration of The Essentials of English Grammar (abbreviated EEG), as I found that I owed the reader some explanations and justifications of various things in that book, which could not very well find their place in the preface or in the introductory chapter. It is my hope that this paper will not be found superfluous, even if I have here dealt with some points that I had already treated, or at any rate touched upon, in previous publications, notably The Philosophy of Grammar (abbreviated PG) and the four volumes of Modern English Grammar (abbreviated MEG). I may plead as an excuse that my points of view have been criticized recently by the late Professor E.A. Sonnenschein, in The Soul of Grammar (Cambridge 1927) and by Professor George O. Curme in two reviews of MEG II and III (in The Journal of English and Germanic Philology), which in spite of the too f lattering words about my work by which they are introduced call for some counter-criticism as they reveal an attitude towards essential points of grammar diametrically opposed to my own. In his Syntax (Boston 1931)—in many ways a most important contribution to linguistic study-Curme has also followed a system and put forward theories so unlike mine that I have felt induced to discuss some of them here.
