Lectures on Language, as Particularly Connected with English Grammar‪.‬

A child asks why a verb said to signify “neither action nor passion” can express the highest possible action. William Stevens Balch says the old grammar books have no answer worth accepting.

In these lectures, Balch takes on a subject many learners remember as a tangle of arbitrary rules and baffling definitions. He argues that language deserves better than lessons that silence questions with appeals to authority: its principles, he insists, should be tested against nature, thought, and the way people actually speak and write. His challenge is both practical and daring—to make grammar clear, useful, and alive, while teaching readers to think for themselves. What changes when the rules are made to answer to reason?

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Who are we? We're Cairn Press. Our background is in design, publishing, typography, and technology. These skills fuel our mission to create the highest quality Public Domain eBooks available online, at an affordable price. We give them the treatment they deserve; our proprietary process restores books for a better overall user experience in design, readability, and e-reader compatibility.