A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language

Last updated
A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language
A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language.jpg
Author Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, & Jan Svartvik
SubjectComprehensive descriptive grammar of the English language
Publisher Longman
Publication date
1985
Media typePrint (Hardcover)
Pages1779
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.

Contents

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]

See also

Notes

  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. Rodney Huddleston (Jun 1988). "Reviewed Work: A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language by Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, Jan Svartvik". Language. Linguistic Society of America. 64 (2): 345–354. doi:10.2307/415437. JSTOR   415437.
  3. 1 2 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.

Related Research Articles

In linguistics, an object pronoun is a personal pronoun that is used typically as a grammatical object: the direct or indirect object of a verb, or the object of a preposition. Object pronouns contrast with subject pronouns. Object pronouns in English take the objective case, sometimes called the oblique case or object case. For example, the English object pronoun me is found in "They see me", "He's giving me my book", and "Sit with me" ; this contrasts with the subject pronoun in "I see them," "I am getting my book," and "I am sitting here."

In linguistics, a subject pronoun is a personal pronoun that is used as the subject of a verb. Subject pronouns are usually in the nominative case for languages with a nominative–accusative alignment pattern. On the other hand, a language with an ergative-absolutive pattern usually has separate subject pronouns for transitive and intransitive verbs: an ergative case pronoun for transitive verbs and an absolutive case pronoun for intransitive verbs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Randolph Quirk</span> British linguist (1920–2017)

Charles Randolph Quirk, Baron Quirk, CBE, FBA was a British linguist and life peer. He was the Quain Professor of English language and literature at University College London from 1968 to 1981. He sat as a crossbencher in the House of Lords.

Rodney D. Huddleston is a British linguist and grammarian specializing in the study and description of English.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">English personal pronouns</span> Closed lexical category of the English language

The English personal pronouns are a subset of English pronouns taking various forms according to number, person, case and grammatical gender. Modern English has very little inflection of nouns or adjectives, to the point where some authors describe it as an analytic language, but the Modern English system of personal pronouns has preserved some of the inflectional complexity of Old English and Middle English.

In grammar, a complement is a word, phrase, or clause that is necessary to complete the meaning of a given expression. Complements are often also arguments.

Generic <i>you</i> Use of the pronoun you to refer to an unspecified person

In English grammar, the personal pronoun you can often be used in the place of one, the fourth-person singular impersonal pronoun, in colloquial speech.

An indefinite pronoun is a pronoun which does not have a specific, familiar referent. Indefinite pronouns are in contrast to definite pronouns.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">English subjunctive</span> English embedded clause type marking non-real possibilities

While the English language lacks distinct inflections for mood, an English subjunctive is recognized in most grammars. Definition and scope of the concept vary widely across the literature, but it is generally associated with the description of something other than apparent reality. Traditionally, the term is applied loosely to cases in which one might expect a subjunctive form in related languages, especially Old English and Latin. This includes conditional clauses, wishes, and reported speech. Modern descriptive grammars limit the term to cases in which some grammatical marking can be observed, nevertheless coming to varying definitions.

Geoffrey Neil Leech FBA was a specialist in English language and linguistics. He was the author, co-author, or editor of more than 30 books and more than 120 published papers. His main academic interests were English grammar, corpus linguistics, stylistics, pragmatics, and semantics.

<i>The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language</i> 2002 compendium on the English language

The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (CamGEL) is a descriptive grammar of the English language. Its primary authors are Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum. Huddleston was the only author to work on every chapter. It was published by Cambridge University Press in 2002 and has been cited more than 8,000 times.

The International Corpus of English(ICE) is a set of corpora representing varieties of English from around the world. Over twenty countries or groups of countries where English is the first language or an official second language are included.

The Survey of English Usage was the first research centre in Europe to carry out research with corpora. The Survey is based in the Department of English Language and Literature at University College London.

Sidney Greenbaum was a British scholar of the English language and of linguistics. He was Quain Professor of English language and literature at the University College London from 1983 to 1990 and Director of the Survey of English Usage, 1983–96. With Randolph Quirk and others, he wrote A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. He also wrote Oxford English Grammar.

The history of English grammars begins late in the sixteenth century with the Pamphlet for Grammar by William Bullokar. In the early works, the structure and rules of English grammar were based on those of Latin. A more modern approach, incorporating phonology, was introduced in the nineteenth century.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">English possessive</span> Possessive words and phrases in the English language

In English, possessive words or phrases exist for nouns and most pronouns, as well as some noun phrases. These can play the roles of determiners or of nouns.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">English phrasal verbs</span> Concept in English grammar

In the traditional grammar of Modern English, a phrasal verb typically constitutes a single semantic unit composed of a verb followed by a particle, sometimes combined with a preposition. Alternative terms include verb-adverb combination, verb-particle construction, two-part word/verb or three-part word/verb and multi-word verb.

Thetical grammar forms one of the two domains of discourse grammar, the other domain being sentence grammar. The building blocks of thetical grammar are theticals, that is, linguistic expressions which are interpolated in, or juxtaposed to, clauses or sentences but syntactically, semantically and, typically, prosodically independent from these structures. The two domains are associated with contrasting principles of designing texts: Whereas sentence grammar is essentially restricted to the structure of sentences in a propositional format, thetical grammar concerns the overall contours of discourse beyond the sentence, thereby being responsible for a higher level of discourse production.

In grammar, an object complement is a predicative expression that follows a direct object of an attributive ditransitive verb or resultative verb and that complements the direct object of the sentence by describing it. Object complements are constituents of the predicate. Noun phrases and adjective phrases most frequently function as object complements.

Jan Lars Svartvik is a Swedish linguist and former professor of English at Lund University (1970–1995). He is the author of several grammar books on English that are widely used in teaching English in Sweden. One of his research areas is also corpus linguistics.