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Excerpt from The Elements of English Grammar
The author wishes to enter a plea for a certain amount of liberty in the interpretations which students may make of various grammatical constructions. The instances in which legitimate difference of opinion may exist are, it is true, relatively infrequent; yet such instances actually do occur. The student, for example, who analyzes the sen tence We asked for bread as consisting of the subject We, the verb asked for, and the object bread, should not be utterly condemned, since his logic after all is perfectly sound. /the preposition for, which 1s a relational or link word, indicating the relation between asked and bread, is certainly as closely united to one word as to the other, and therefore may as appropriately be grouped with one as with the other. The student who is capable of such a logical analysis should be given due credit and encourage ment for it. The question as to how much independence of judgment pupils in general should be allowed and to what extent uniformity of terminology in class-room work is necessary must be left for every teacher to decide ac cording to the special circumstances of each case. Com plete uniformity, however, at the expense of an inquiring and independent attitude of mind on the part of the stu dents, is certainly too dearly bought to justify itself. The author is personally of the opinion that nothing is lost and a good deal is gained by a frank confession that our system of grammatical classification and terminology is to a con siderable extent arbitrary and conventional, and that in many instances other classification and terminology would be just as reasonable as those which we follow.
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