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Jens Otto Harry Jespersen or Otto Jespersen (16 July 1860 – 30 April 1943) He was a Danish linguist who specialized in the grammar of the English language. He helped to revolutionize language teaching in Europe, contributed greatly to the advancement of phonetics, linguistic theory, and the history of English, and originated an international language, Novial

Otto Jespersen was born in Randers in Jutland. He was inspired by the work of Danish philologist Rasmus Rask as a boy, and with the help of Rask's grammars taught himself some Icelandic, Italian, and Spanish. He decided to explore language studies at a time when phonetics and reform in language teaching were prime concerns. He entered the University of Copenhagen in 1877 when he was 17, initially studying law but not forgetting his language studies. In 1881 he shifted his focus completely to languages and in 1887 earned his master's degree in French, with English and Latin as his secondary languages. He supported himself during his studies through part-time work as a schoolteacher and as a shorthand reporter in the Danish parliament. In 1887–1888, he traveled to England, Germany and France, meeting linguists like Henry Sweet and Paul Passy and attending lectures at institutions like Oxford University. Following the advice of his mentor Vilhelm Thomsen, he returned to Copenhagen in August 1888 and began work on his doctoral dissertation on the English case system. He successfully defended his dissertation in 1891.

Jespersen was a professor of English at the University of Copenhagen from 1893 to 1925, and served as Rector of the university in 1920–21. His early work focused primarily on language teaching reform and on phonetics, but he is best known for his later work on syntax and on language development. He advanced the theories of Rank and Nexus in Danish in two papers. He was most widely recognized for some of his books. Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin (1922) is considered by many to be his masterpiece.^[3] Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles (1909–1949), concentrated on morphology and syntax, and Growth and Structure of the English Language (1905) is a comprehensive view of English by someone with another native language, and still in print, over 70 years after his death and more than 100 years after publication. Late in his life he published Analytic Syntax (1937), in which he presents his views on syntactic structure using an idiosyncratic shorthand notation. In The Philosophy of Grammar (1924) he challenged the accepted views of common concepts in Grammar and proposed corrections to the basic definitions of grammatical case, pronoun, object, voice etc., and developed further his notions of Rankand Nexus. In the 21st century this book is still used as one of the basic texts in modern Structural linguistics. Mankind, Nation and Individual: from a linguistic point of view (1925) is one of the pioneering works on Sociolinguistics.

Jespersen visited the United States twice: he lectured at the Congress of Arts and Sciences in St. Louis in 1904, and in 1909–1910 he visited both the University of California and Columbia University. While in the U.S., he took occasion to study the country's educational system. His autobiography (see below) was published in English translation as recently as 1995.

Jespersen was a proponent of phonosemanticism and wrote: “Is there really much more logic in the opposite extreme which denies any kind of sound symbolism (apart from the small class of evident echoisms and ‘onomatopoeia’) and sees in our words only a collection of accidental and irrational associations of sound and meaning? ...There is no denying that there are words which we feel instinctively to be adequate to express the ideas they stand for.”

After his retirement in 1925, Jespersen remained active in the international linguistic community. In addition to continuing to write, he convened and chaired the first International Meeting on Linguistic Research in Geneva in 1930, and acted as president of the Fourth International Congress of Linguists in Copenhagen in 1936.

Jespersen was an important figure in the international language movement. He was an early supporter of the Esperanto offshoot Ido and in 1927 published his own project Novial. He also worked with the International Auxiliary Language Association.

Jespersen received honorary degrees from Columbia University in New York (1910), St. Andrews University in Scotland (1925), and the Sorbonne in Paris (1927). He was one of the first six international scholars to be elected as honorary members of the Linguistic Society of America.

Interesting facts

Jespersen was an important figure in the international language movement. He was an early supporter of the Esperanto offshoot Ido and in 1927 published his own project novial. He also worked with the international auxiliary language association.

Jespersen received honorary degrees from Columbia university in New York (1910), St. Andrews university in Scotland (1925), and the Sorbonne in Paris (1927). He was one of the first six international scholars to be elected as honorary members of the linguistic society of America.

The fruitful work of the Danish scientist in various fields of linguistics is reflected in more than 450 published works. Most of them are written in Danish (approximately 350)

The theory of Rank

The theory of the three ranks by O. Jespersen for the first time allowed us to see the hierarchy of syntactic relations hiding behind the linearity of the speech chain. Jespersen sees in the collocation “terribly cold weather” the presence of two levels of subordination and assigns to the words, depending on the tier they occupy, the ranks of primary- weather, secondary - cold and tertiary - terribly. To his mind, any complex designation of an object is always based on the inequality of words denoting it. The main word that is of primary importance is singled out, it is specified by another word that subordinates a tertiary word.

Despite the fact that tertiary words can in turn be modified by the quaternary, and the latter by the words of the fifth "rank", Jespersen does not see the need to distinguish more than three ranks of the hierarchy, since he believes that higher ranks are no different from the first three.

Jespersen does not connect the signs of primary, secondary and tertiary with a certain syntactic function and believes that in combination I see a dog the noun dog also should be considered the primary word. Jespersen does not limit his doctrine of ranks to words as the basic units of the language, but also extends it to the phrase. In fact, the theory of the three ranks represents the ranks of positional relations.

BUT! A serious shortcoming of the theory of the three ranks should be considered the absence of recognition criteria for each rank, as a result of which the assignment of a number of statements to a particular rank remains unproven.

Conclusion

The indisputable value of the “Theory of the three ranks” lies in the fact that Jespersen showed, however, rather purely empirically the hierarchy of relations that lies behind the linear construction of the speech chain. The idea of the hierarchy of syntactic constructions permeates all modern syntactic theories, therefore the theory of the three ranks of Jespersen remains relevant as the first attempt to formulate and substantiate the principle of hierarchical construction of language structures.

Список литературы.

https://ru.wikipedia.org

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Otto-Jespersen

http://www.classes.ru/grammar/42.Teoreticheskaya_grammatika_sovremennogo_angliyskogo_yazyka/2-2-6--teorija-trekh-rangov-o.htm

http://www.dissercat.com/content/metodologicheskie-osobennosti-lingvisticheskoi-kontseptsii-otto-espersena

http://pomnipro.ru/memorypage42101/biography