The literary history, as I conceive it, is an account of one strand, so to speak, in a very complex tissue: it is connected with the intellectual and social development; it represents movements of thought which may sometimes check and be sometimes propitious to the existing forms of art; it is the utterance of a class which may represent, or fail to represent, the main national movement; it is affected more or less directly by all manner of religious, political, social, and economical changes; and it is dependent upon the occurrence of individual genius for which we cannot even profess to account. I propose to take the history of English literature in the eighteenth century. I do not aim at originality: I take for granted the ordinary critical judgments upon the great writers of whom so much has been said by judges certainly more competent than myself, and shall recall the same facts both of ordinary history and of the history of thought. What I hope is, that by bringing familiar facts together I may be able to bring out the nature of the connection between them; and, little as I can say that will be at all new, to illustrate one point of view, which, as I believe, it is desirable that literary histories should take into account more distinctly than they have generally done.

Klasik Türk Şiiri sahasında kullanılmış her bir nazım şeklinin elde bulunan hemen tüm divanların taranması suretiyle incelenip tarihsel seyrinin ortaya konması, edebiyat tarihimizin bir bütün olarak değerlendirilmesi açısından oldukça zaruridir. Altı yüz yıllık tarihi geçmişe sahip Klasik Türk şiirinin asırları aşıp günümüze kadar gelen her bir nazım şeklini biçim ve muhteva bakımından ayrı ayrı değerlendirerek ortaya çıkarmak, bu sahaya gönlünü ve ömrünü vermiş birçok araştırmacının ortak arzusudur. Bu arzu neticesinde bu çalışmamızda, tamamen millî bir nazım biçimi olarak kabul gören tuyuğ nazım şeklinin biçimsel ve tarihsel serüvenini, tespit edilen yaklaşık 1500 tuyuğu da çalışmaya katmak suretiyle ortaya koymaya çalıştık.

La morphologie, visant à étudier spécialement la structure interne des mots, se divise traditionnellement en deux branches : morphologie dérivationnelle (ou lexicale), s’intéressant à l’aspect formationnel (dérivationnel) des mots complexes (dérivés ou construits) et morphologie flexionnelle, s’occupant spécifiquement de l’aspect flexionnel. C’est ce deuxième aspect qui est adopté dans cet ouvrage, qui essaie de rendre cette matière quelque peu complexe, même pour un public averti, plus accessible par tous, notamment par les apprenants étrangers, en sélectionnant une méthodologie « distributionnelle ». En effet, les travaux existants en la matière sont purement descriptifs et souvent assez complexes et, par conséquent, ne conviennent guère au public méconnaissant le domaine et encore moins aux étudiants qui tâchent d’appréhender le fonctionnement morphologique d’une langue étrangère.

Il s’agit, donc, d’un ouvrage d’initiation, de nature pédagogique, spécialement conçu pour l’enseignement et l’apprentissage de la morphologie du français. Ainsi, tout en apprenant les techniques d’analyses morphologiques, ces derniers saisiront plus facilement les fondements de la flexion des mots français. D’où, l’autre caractéristique de l’ouvrage, qui se veut, autant que possible, d’une simplicité, aussi bien sur les plans du contenu, du corpus, de la méthode d’analyse et de la description qu’au niveau métalinguistique.