Here the great Danish linguist Otto Jespersen puts forward his views on grammatical structure in a kind of shorthand formalism, devising symbols that represent various grammatical elements and then analyzing numerous sentences in terms of these symbols. The contemporaneity of these analyses is remarkable, for they allude to concepts that were uncongenial to linguists in 1937 when the book was first published, but which have come to be generally accepted in the linguistics community during the past twenty-five years.

Otto Jespersen (1860-1943) was professor of English at the University of Copenhagen. Among his many works in Growth and Structure of the English Language, also published by the University of Chicago Press.