ABSTRACT
In the meantime – between Seminars, as it were – I got on with my work at the Survey. RQ had set up this ambitious project the year before. Its aim was breathtakingly simple in conception, and mind-disturbingly complex in execution: to provide a description of the grammatical features of all varieties of spoken and written English. Surprisingly, this had never been done. The grammars of English that had been written in the past all suffered from different handicaps and limitations. Most were highly prescriptive, aiming to tell people how they ought to write and speak according to the author’s opinion about what was correct and incorrect. The complex and varying realities of everyday spoken and written usage would not be found in those pages. Most were based on the written language, with little or no attention paid to the very different ways in which grammar was used in speech. But even within those approaches, there was an enormous selectivity – whole areas of grammatical construction (such as the way in which sentences combine into discourses) simplified or disregarded. There was distortion, too, with English sentences being forced to fit the straitjacket of Latin grammar. Several of the better books were pedagogical grammars, orientated towards teaching English as a foreign language; this made them speech-aware, but at the same time highly simplified. And the linguistically inspired descriptive accounts, such as Charles Carpenter Fries’s The Structure of English, were programmatic in character. Nobody had previously attempted to adopt a linguistically principled grammatical perspective, and apply it systematically and comprehensively to a large and representative collection
(or corpus) of English data. This is what the Quirk Survey was intending to do.
