A Grammar of Contemporary English, English
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RANDOLPH QUIRK
A GRAMMAR OF
SIDNEY GREENBAUM
CONTEMPORARY
GEOFFREY LEECH
ENGLISH
JAN SVARTVIK
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LONGMAN GROUP UK LIMITED
Longman House, Burnt Mill, Hartow,
Essex CM20 2JE, England
and Associated Companies throughout the world.
© Longman Group Ltd 1972
All rights reserved; no part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in
any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without
the prior written permission of the Copyright owner.
First published 1972
Ninth impression (corrected) 1980
Twentieth impression 1992
ISBN 0 582 52444 X
Produced by Longman Singapore Publishers Pte Ltd
Printed in Singapore
PREFACE
The first attempts at producing a grammar of English were made when there were
less than ten million speakers of English in the world, almost all of them living within
100 miles or so of London. Grammars of English have gone on being written during
the intervening 400 years reflecting a variety (and growing complexity) of needs,
while speakers of English have multiplied several hundredfold and dispersed
themselves so that the language has achieved a uniquely wide spread throughout the
world and, with that, a unique importance.
We make no apology for adding one more to the succession of English grammars. In
the first place, though fairly brief synopses are common enough, there have been very
few attempts at so comprehensive a coverage as is offered in the present work. Fewer
still in terms of synchronic description. And none at all so comprehensive or in such
depth has been produced within an English-speaking country. Moreover, our
Grammar aims at this comprehensiveness and depth in treating English irrespective
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of frontiers: our field is no less than the grammar of educated English current in the
second half of the twentieth century in the world's major English-speaking
communities. Only where a feature belongs specifically to British usage or American
usage, to informal conversation or to the dignity of formal writing, are 'labels'
introduced in the description to show that we are no longer discussing the 'common
core' of educated English.
For this common core, as well as for the special varieties surrounding it, we have
augmented our own experience as speakers and teachers of the language with
research on corpora of contemporary English and on data from elicitation tests, in
both cases making appropriate use of facilities available in our generation for
bringing spoken English fully within the grammarian's scope. For reasons of
simplicity and economic presentation, however, illustrative examples from our basic
material are seldom given without being adapted and edited; and while informal and
familiar styles of speech and writing receive due consideration in our treatment, we
put the main emphasis on describing the English of serious exposition.
When work on this Grammar began, the four collaborators were all on the staff of the
English Department, University College London, and jointly involved in the Survey
of English Usage. This association has happily survived a dispersal which has put
considerable distances between us (at the extremes, the 5000 miles between
Wisconsin and Europe). Common research goals would thus have kept us in close
touch even without a rather large unified undertaking to complete. And
Preface vii
vi Preface
though physical separation has made collaboration more arduous and time-
consuming, it has also - we console ourselves in retrospect - conferred positive
benefits. For example, we have been able to extend our linguistic horizons by contact
with linguists bred in several different traditions; and our ideas have been revised and
improved by exposure to far more richly varied groups of students than would have
been
possible in any one centre.
It will be obvious that our grammatical framework has drawn heavily both on the
long-established tradition and on the insights of several contemporary schools of
linguistics. But while we have taken account of modern linguistic theory to the extent
that we think justifiable in a grammar of this kind, we have not felt that this was the
occasion for detailed discussion of theoretical issues. Nor do we see need to justify
the fact that we subscribe to no specific one of the current or recently formulated
linguistic theories. Each of those propounded from the time of de Saus-sure and
Jespersen onwards has its undoubted merits, and several (notably the
transformational-generaUve approaches) have contributed very great stimulus to us
as to other grammarians. None, however, seems yet adequate to account for all
linguistic phenomena, and recent trends suggest that our own compromise position is
a fair reflection of the way in which the major theories are responding to influence
from others.
As well as such general debt to our students, our contemporaries, our teachers and out
teachers' teachers, there are specific debts to numerous colleagues and friends which
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we are happy to acknowledge even if we cannot hope to repay. Five linguists
generously undertook the heavy burden of reading and criticizing a preliminary draft
of the entire book: Dwight L. BoUnger, Bengt Jacobsson, Ruth M. Kempson, Edward
Hirschland and Paul Portland. His many friends who have been fortunate enough to
receive comments on even a short research paper will have some idea of how much
we have profited from Professor Bolinger'a deep learning, keen intellect, incredible
facility for producing the devastating counter-example, and - by no means least -
readiness to give self-lessly of his time. The other four critics had qualities of this
same kind and (for example) many of our most telling illustrations come from the
invaluable files assembled by Dr Jacobsson over many years of meticulous
scholarship.
Colleagues working on the Survey of English Usage have of course been repeatedly
involved in giving advice and criticism; we are glad to take this opportunity of
expressing our thanks to Valerie Adams and Derek Davy, Judith Perryman, Florent
Aarts and Michael Black, as also to Cindy Kapsos and Pamela Miller.For comments
on specific parts, we are grateful to Ross Almqvist and Ulla Thagg (Chapters 3,4, and
12), Jacquelyn Biel (especially Chapters 5 and 8), Peter Fries (Chapter 9),
A. C. Gimson (Appendix II) and Michael Riddle (Appendix III). The research and
writing have been supported in part by grants from HM Department of Education and
Science, the Leverhulme Trust, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, the Longman
Group, the Graduate School Research Committee of the University of Wisconsin-
Milwaukee, the University of Goteborg, the University of Lund, and University Col-
lege London.
For what Fredson Bowers has called 'authorial fair copy expressing final intention',
the publisher received from us something more resembling the manuscript of
Killigrew's Conspiracy in 1638: a' Foul Draught' full of'Corrections, Expungings, and
Additions'. We owe it largely to Peggy Drinkwater's unswerving concentration that
this has been transformed into orderly print.
March 1972
RQ SO GL JS
PREFACE TO THE NINTH IMPRESSION
For the hundreds of improvements incorporated since the first impression, we are in
large measure indebted to colleagues all over the world who have presented us with
detailed comments, whether in published reviews or in private communications. In
particular, we should like to express our gratitude to Broder Carstensen, R. A. Close,
D. Crystal, R. Dirven, V. Fried, G. Guntram, R. R. K. Hartmann, R. A. Hudson, Y.
Ikegami, R. Ilson, S. Jacobson, H. V. King, R. B. Long, Andre Moulin, Y. Murata, N.
E. Osselton, M. Rensky, M. L. Samuels, Irene Simon, B. M. H. Strang, Gabriele
Stein, M. Swan, J. Taglicht, Kathleen Wales, Janet Whitcut, and R. W. Zandvoort.
July 1980
CONTENTS
Preface v
Symbols and technical conventions xi
One
The English language 1
4
Two
The sentence: a preliminary view 33
Three
The verb phrase 61
Four
Nouns, pronouns, and the basic noun phrase 123
Five
Adjectives and adverbs 229
Six
Prepositions and prepositional phrases 297
Seven
The simple sentence 339
Eight
Adjuncts, disjuncts, conjuncts 417
Nine
Coordination and apposition 533
Ten
Sentence connection 649
Eleven
The complex sentence 717
Twelve
The verb and its complementation 799
x Contents
Thirteen
The complex noun phrase 855
Fourteen
Focus, theme, and emphasis 935
Appendix 1
Word-formation 973
Appendix II
Stress, rhythm, and intonation 1033
Appendix III Punctuation 1053
Bibliography 1083 Index 1093
i
SYMBOLS AND TECHNICAL CONVENTIONS
Since our use of symbols, abbreviations, bracketing and the like follows tbe practice
in most works of linguistics, all that we need here is a visual summary of the main
types of convention with a brief explanation or a reference to where fuller
information is given.
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