''A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language'' is a

descriptive grammar In the study of language, description or descriptive linguistics is the work of objectively analyzing and describing how language is actually used (or how it was used in the past) by a speech community. François & Ponsonnet (2013). All acad ...

of English written by

Randolph Quirk Charles Randolph Quirk, Baron Quirk, CBE, FBA (12 July 1920 – 20 December 2017) 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 ...

Sidney Greenbaum Sidney Greenbaum (31 December 1929 – 28 May 1996) 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 ...

, Geoffrey Leech, and Jan Svartvik. It was first published by

Longman Longman, also known as Pearson Longman, is a publishing company founded in London, England, in 1724 and is owned by Pearson PLC. Since 1968, Longman has been used primarily as an imprint by Pearson's Schools business. The Longman brand is also ...

in 1985. 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." The book relies on elicitation experiments as well as three

corpora Corpus is Latin for "body". It may refer to: Linguistics * Text corpus, in linguistics, a large and structured set of texts * Speech corpus, in linguistics, a large set of speech audio files * Corpus linguistics, a branch of linguistics Music * ...

: a corpus from the

Survey of English Usage 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. History The Survey of English Usage wa ...

, the

Lancaster-Oslo-Bergen Corpus The Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen (LOB) Corpus is a million-word collection of British English texts which was compiled in the 1970s in collaboration between the University of Lancaster, the University of Oslo, and the Norwegian Computing Centre for the ...

(UK English), and the

Brown Corpus The Brown University Standard Corpus of Present-Day American English (or just Brown Corpus) is an electronic collection of text samples of American English, the first major structured corpus of varied genres. This corpus first set the bar for the ...

(US English).

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1985 non-fiction books English grammar books Corpus linguistics {{Grammar-book-stub

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