A Grammar of Contemporary English

by Randolph Quirk (Collaborator), Sidney Greenbaum (Collaborator), Geoffrey Leech (Collaborator)

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Genres: Linguistics

1120 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1972

About the author

Quirk was born at Lambfell, in Michael on the Isle of Man, the son of Thomas and Amy Randolph Quirk. He attended King William's College on the Isle of Man and then went to University College London to read English under Albert Hugh Smith. His studies began in 1939 but were interrupted by the war in 1940, to be completed from 1945 to 1947. He was awarded MA, PhD, and D.Lit and became a lecturer in English at UCL from 1947 to 1954. He was also a Commonwealth Fund Harkness Fellow, at Yale and Michigan from 1951 to 1952. In 1954 he became Reader at the University of Durham, becoming Professor there in 1958. He returned to UCL as Professor in 1960 and in 1968 succeeded Smith as Quain Professor, a post he held until 1981.
Quirk lectured and taught seminars at University College, London, in Old English (Anglo-Saxon) and in History of the English Language. These two disciplines were part of a ten-discipline set of Final examinations in the undergraduate syllabus. At that time, Old and Middle English, along with History of the English Language, were all compulsory subjects. He also worked closely with A.C. Gimson and J.D. O'Connor of the Phonetics Department, sitting in as an examiner for Phonetics oral examinations on occasion.

Reviews

[David Chmelik · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the kind of textbook or reference book students should use before or at the time they take English 101--likely even in middle school. I was quite unimpressed that my English 101 went over some primary school-level spelling rather than a book such as this. At least we wrote a 10-page paper, though it was supposed to be 20-page.

[Lokendro Angom]

very nice