1 republic of uzbekistan ministry of higher and secondary specialised education

Jens Otto Harry Jespersen
(Danish: 
[ˈʌtsʰo ˈjespɐsn̩]; 16 July 1860 – 30 April 
1943) was a Danish linguist who 
specialized in the grammar of the English 
language. Steven Mithen described him as 
"one of the greatest language scholars of the 
nineteenth and twentieth centuries." 
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 

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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. 

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