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A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language
1985 compendium on the English language From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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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]
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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.
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See also
Notes
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