David Crystal: The Bigger Quirk

'If you W"antto knoW"hoW"a grallllllatical construction

W"orks, you use. a grallllllary'A Comprehensive Grammarof the English LanguageBy Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum,Geoffrey Leech and Jan SvartvikLongman £39.50.

In' the beginning was 'big Quirk'-otherwiseknown as the 1,100-page A Grammar of Con­temporary English, by Quirk, Greenbaum,Leech and Svartvik, published by Longman in1972. The following year there came forth 'littleQuirk'-the abridged version, A UniversityGrammar of English, by Quirk and GreenhamNow what' are we to do? This new book, by thesame grammarians, is nearly 1,800 pages. Isuppose we must call it 'the bigger Quirk', thusallowing some leeway, in case the exhaustioncurrently affecting this prolific team turns outto be only temporary.

The new grammar is an awe-inspiring work,by any standards. The best description is to callit a 'reference grammar'~just as a dictionarycan be called a 'reference lexicon'. If you wantto know the meaning or use of a word, youlook it up in a dictionary. Similarly, if you wantto know how a grammatical construction works,or how it is used, you look it up in a gram­mary.

The problem, of course, is that you can'torganise a grammar on a simple alphabeticalprinciple (active voice, adjectives, adverbs,antecedents, apposition, articles ... ). Actives,for instance, need to be discussed along withpassives: to have one under A and the otherunder P would be pointless. There's only oneway round this problem: any grammar bookhas got to have an intelligible introduction, sothat readers can find their way about the bookbefore going into it in depth; and it has got tohave a large index, to aid information retrievalon detailed points. This book has both. Its 17detailed chapters and three appendices are fol­lowed by 113 pages of index (of which I mustacknowledge myself to be the compiler), andpreceded by two general chapters. Chapter Oneintroduces the language in general, and gram­mar in particular. Chapter Two reviews thewhole field, explaining concepts andcategories--a much more systematic review,incidentally, than the corresponding chapter inthe big Q. If you~e new to the world ofreference grammars, don't dip into this onewithout reading Chapter Two first.

Northern Europe has brought forth manygrammatical handbooks (by Jespersen,Kruisinga and others); but this latest grammar

far exceeds these earlier works in breadth anddepth of detail. For instance, more attention ispaid to differences between the main standardvarieties of English-between speech and writ­ing, in particular, but also between many con­structions that are regionally or stylistically dis­tinctive. For anyone who had the mind, itwould be quite straightforward to use the indexto pull out of the grammar the 300 or sodifferences between British and AmericanEnglish, or the 500 instances of formal andinformal English, to see which parts of the

. language are most affected. It would have beenimpossible to find such things out previously:earlier grammars either ignored the fact thatthese differences existed, or buried the in-

. formation deep inside their pages so that theywere all but impossible to find.

The book is also immensely strong on exam­ples of usages, and how they should be analy­sed. This is typical of the approach of thesegrammarians, who have made good use of thefiles of the Survey of English Usage at Uni­versity College, London. There's nothing worsethan a grammar based solely on the impressionsor intuitions of an author-as is unfortunatelyall too common in popular paperbacks on us­age. This grammar avoids that problem. In

Quirk: master-grammarian

particular, it contains several statistical observa­tions, derived from various surveys. For inst­ance, at one point, there's a table which tellsyou about the frequency of sentences of thetype because X happened, Y happened and Yhappened, because X happened. Which do youthink is the more frequent pattern, and by howmuch? Stop here and think about it, before youread on. In fact, in two big surveys (one ofspeech, one of writing), 407 out of 425 suchcases were of the latter type. I hadn't expectedsuch a marked bias, and if I were teaching thelanguage to foreigners, or discussing norms ofstye in a literature class, this information wouldbe extremely helpful. Nuggets of this kind arespread throughout the grammar-more than inthe previous books, but still far too thinly formy liking. I would have liked to see many moresuch tables.

So what are the main differences betweenthe new book and the previous unabridgedwork? Most obviously, it is almost twice aslong-for several reasons. Some topics are pre­sented in much more detail (e.g. 'commentclauses', such as you know, were given only apage in the previous book-they have six pageshere). Far more space is devoted to a discus­sion of divided usage (e.g. the modern use ofhopefully, which upsets some people so). Re­cent perspectives in linguistic analysis are intro­duced. Literary scholars will be pleased to seethat core grammatical issues are now clearlyrelated to questions of style-particularly no­ticeable in the new final chapter, 'From Sent­ence to Text'. And in general, the authors aremuch more explicit about their assumptions,and more comprehensive in their citation ofother approaches (there are over 700 biblio­graphical references). As a result, some topicswhich were treated in single chapters previouslyare in two chapters now-the verb, for inst­ance. Because of the increase in size, specialefforts have been made to aid informationretrieval: there are more cross-references be­tween sections, and there is the aforementionedindex, five times the length of the previousone. The style is more leisurely, too. The bookis aimed both at specialists and at others whowant information about their language. Theauthors have therefore explained terms as theygo along, in a discursive way. Rules are givenin ordinary language, not in formulae; andthere is a good balance between examples andcommentary .

It is a remarkable achievement, the climax ofover 20 years work by this team of gramma­rians. It is surprising that the book was writtenat all: it took five years to complete, duringwhich time no two of the authors lived in thesame place. It is a result of an enormousamount of correspondence, and two ferocious'write-ins'. And after it was over, there was nota little agonising over the title. In the end, theychose 'comprehensive'-a good choice, for thebook does indeed cover every important de­velopment in the description of English gram­mar in recent years. But don't be misled: theword does not mean 'complete'. There's stillplenty left to be discovered about the facts ofthe language. We might well see a 'biggestQuirk' one day.