''A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language'' is a descriptive grammar of English written by Randolph Quirk,

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 Directo ...

Geoffrey Leech Geoffrey Neil Leech FBA (16 January 1936 – 19 August 2014) was a specialist in English language and linguistics. He was the author, co-author, or editor of over 30 books and over 120 published papers. His main academic interests were English ...

, 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: a corpus from the Survey of English Usage, 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 (US English).

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

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