A_Comprehensive_Grammar_of_the_English_Language

<i>A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language</i>

A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language

1985 compendium on the English language

A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language is a descriptive grammar of English written by Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, and Jan Svartvik. It was first published by Longman in 1985.

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In 1991, it was called "The greatest of contemporary grammars, because it is the most thorough and detailed we have," and "It is a grammar that transcends national boundaries."[1]

The book relies on elicitation experiments as well as three corpora: a corpus from the Survey of English Usage, the Lancaster-Oslo-Bergen Corpus (UK English), and the Brown Corpus (US English).[2]

Reviews

In 1988, Rodney Huddleston published a very critical review.[3] He wrote:

[T]here are some respects in which it is seriously flawed and disappointing. A number of quite basic categories and concepts do not seem to have been thought through with sufficient care; this results in a remarkable amount of unclarity and inconsistency in the analysis, and in the organization of the grammar.[3]

  • Aarts, F. G. A. M. (April 1988). "A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language: The great tradition continued". English Studies. 69 (2): 163–173. doi:10.1080/00138388808598565.

See also

Notes

  1. [1]
    John Algeo, "American English Grammars in the Twentieth Century", in Gerhard Leitner (Ed.), English Traditional Grammars: An International Perspective (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1991), pp. 113–138.
  2. [2]
    Rodney Huddleston (Jun 1988). "Reviewed Work: A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language by Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, Jan Svartvik". Language. 64 (2). Linguistic Society of America: 345–354. doi:10.2307/415437. JSTOR 415437.
  3. [3]
    Huddleston, Rodney (1988). "A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language by Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, Jan Svartvik". Language. 64: 345–354. doi:10.2307/415437. JSTOR 415437.
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