Otto Jespersen

Otto Jespersen
Otto Jespersen, 1915.
Born	Jens Otto Harry Jespersen (1860-07-16)16 July 1860 Randers, Denmark
Died	30 April 1943(1943-04-30) (aged 82) Roskilde, Denmark
Residence	Copenhagen
Nationality	Danish
Occupation	Academic

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.

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 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: Sprogets logik (1913) and De to hovedarter af grammatiske forbindelser (1921). 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. Junction and nexus proved valuable in bringing the concept of context to the forefront of the attention of the world of linguistics.