Jens Otto Harry Jespersen or Otto Jespersen (Danish: [ʌtˢo ˈjɛsb̥ɐsn̩]; 16 July 1860 – 30 April 1943) was a Danish linguist who specialized in the grammar of the English language.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Jespersen in this theory of ranks removes the parts of speech from the syntax, and differentiates between primaries, secondaries, and tertiaries; e.g. in 'well honed phrase,' 'phrase' is a primary, this being defined by a secondary, 'honed', which again is defined by a tertiary 'well'.
The term Nexus is applied to sentences, structures similar to sentences and sentences in formation, in which two concepts are expressed in one unit; e.g., it rained, he ran indoors.
This term is qualified by a further concept called a junction which represents one idea, expressed by means of two or more elements, whereas a nexus combines two ideas.
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.
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 Rank and Nexus.
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.
“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? ...
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 received honorary degrees from Columbia University in New York (1910), St. Andrews University in Scotland (1925), and the Sorbonne in Paris (1927).