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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 June 2016
Charles Carpenter Fries stressed two points of methodology in his American English Grammar. First, his conclusions about modern American usage were not based upon impressions of the language but upon a statistical investigation that showed the relative frequency, and hence the importance, of each phenomenon noted. Such an investigation necessitated the sifting of an enormous bulk of clearly-defined and classified source material. Second, Fries was more interested in studying the structural relationships of one syntactical unit to another than in studying their lexical meanings.
1 Fries, C. C., American English Grammar (New York, 1940)Google Scholar.
2 See, for example, Fries 114, where, discussing the use of function words with substantives, he says: “It will be our task, therefore, not to analyze the meanings which it is alleged that these words express but rather to indicate the grammatical relationships into which the substantive is brought by the use of the function word.”
3 See Fries 109 for a definition of a function word.
4 All quotations are taken from The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, second edition, ed. Robinson, F. N. (Cambridge, Mass., 1957)Google Scholar. His spelling and punctuation is consistently reproduced. The number after each title indicates the length of that passage.
5 Fries 119, 122-5.
6 Fries 123.
7 Fries 123.
8 Curme, G. O., A Grammar of the English Language, vol. 3 (Boston, 1931), p. 113 Google Scholar.
9 A case in point is perhaps Fries’s example (p. 123), “the training received…would be a great help to me,” where to me, according to him, can modify either the verb or the noun. Yet on the preceding page he cites “a great benefit to me” as an example of a substantive modifying a noun. The cases do not seem fundamentally different.