A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language
{{Short description|1985 compendium on the English language}}
{{Infobox book
| title =
| image = A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language.jpg
| caption =
| author = Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, & Jan Svartvik
| subject = Comprehensive descriptive grammar of the English language
| publisher = Longman
| pub_date = 1985
| media_type = Print (Hardcover)
| pages = 1779
| isbn = 9780582517349
}}
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.
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."John Algeo, "American English Grammars in the Twentieth Century", in Gerhard Leitner (Ed.), [https://books.google.com/books?id=fTZsQRPS0r0C&q=quirk English Traditional Grammars: An International Perspective] (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1991), pp. 113–138.
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).{{cite journal |title=Reviewed Work: A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language by Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, Jan Svartvik |author=Rodney Huddleston |date=Jun 1988 |journal=Language |publisher=Linguistic Society of America |doi=10.2307/415437 |volume=64 |pages=345–354 |number=2|jstor=415437 |url=https://archive.org/details/comprehensivegra00englrich }}
Reviews
In 1988, Rodney Huddleston published a very critical review.{{Cite journal |last=Huddleston |first=Rodney |date=1988 |title=A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language by Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, Jan Svartvik |url=http://archive.org/details/comprehensivegra00englrich |journal=Language |volume=64 |pages=345–354 |doi=10.2307/415437 |jstor=415437}} 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.
- {{cite journal|last1=Aarts|first1=F. G. A. M.|title=A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language: The great tradition continued|journal=English Studies|pages=163–173|doi=10.1080/00138388808598565|date=April 1988|volume=69|number=2}}
See also
Notes
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language}}
Category:1985 non-fiction books
Category:English grammar books
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