XII Международная студенческая научная конференция Студенческий научный форум - 2020

General information

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 a crossbencher in the House of Lords.

Quirk was born at Lambfell, Michael, Isle of Man, where his family farmed, the son of Thomas and Amy Randolph Quirk. He attended Douglas High School for Boys on the island and then went to University College London (UCL) to read English (the department relocated to Aberystwyth due to the war) under A.H. Smith. His studies began in 1939 but were interrupted in 1940 by five years of service in Bomber Command of the RAF, where he rose to the rank of squadron leader.

Quirk became so deeply interested in explosives that he started an external degree in chemistry, but his English undergraduate studies were completed from 1945 to 1947 (with the department back in Bloomsbury) and was then invited to take up a research fellowship in Cambridge; however he took up a counter-offer of a junior lectureship at UCL, which he held until 1952. In this period he completed his MA on phonology and his PhD thesis on syntax, and in 1951 became a post-doctoral Commonwealth Fund fellow at Yale University and Michigan State University.

Shortly after his return from the US in 1952, he moved to the University of Durham, becoming reader there in 1954, and professor 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 gave seminars at UCL in Old English (Anglo-Saxon) and the History of the English Language.

In 1985, he was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters by the University of Bath.

Charles Randolph Quirk’s contribution to linguistics

In 1959 Randolph Quirk, who has died aged 97, embarked on a long-term project to produce a comprehensive analysis of British English as it is actually used in the present day, rather than as reflected in the distorting mirrors of ivory-tower linguists and armchair pedants. In doing so he came to have an enormous influence on the development of English language studies worldwide, particularly through his advocacy of Standard English, the common written ground maintained despite variations in speech, as a way of opening doors educationally.

On his appointment the following year as professor at University College London, he read a paper to the Philological Society laying out the ground plan for a large-scale Survey of English Usage. Its goals were to compile and investigate a corpus or databank of spoken and written English. In Quirk’s view, deeply unfashionable at that time, good, reliable accounts of the language must rest securely on a wide sampling of authentic, observed language in use. To rely on the intuition of a native speaker was not enough.

For this balanced corpus it was important to collect equally large and varied amounts of both writing and speech, eventually 500 texts of 2,000 words each, to give 1m words. This – in the days of heavy reel-to-reel tape-recorders – required a vast investment of time and effort by the survey’s research team in the collection and detailed transcription of the spoken language in all its variety. Hence a first product of the survey was a concentrated study of the grammar, intonation and many other aspects of spoken English, which up to that point had been little studied outside phonetics departments.

Over the 1960s and 70s, the survey built up a worldwide reputation for sound, innovative, empirical research. By 1981, when Quirk gave up his directorship of it (though not his involvement), its corpus of language data was more or less complete, and its new methods of language study had become well-known through many publications. It had provided an apprenticeship for an emerging generation of internationally well-known English language scholars – notably Jan Svartvik, David Crystal and Sidney Greenbaum – the last of whom continued Quirk’s leadership as the survey’s new director. With three other grammarians, Greenbaum, Svartvik and myself, he used the survey’s methods and materials to produce a series of analytical works, from A Grammar of Contemporary English (1972) to A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (1985).

Survey of English Usage

In 1959, Quirk founded the Survey of English Usage, working with Valerie Adams, Derek Davy and David Crystal; they sampled written and spoken British English produced between 1955 and 1985. The corpus comprises 200 texts, each of 5,000 words. The spoken texts include dialogue and monologue, and the written texts material intended for both reading and reading aloud.

The project was to be the foundation of A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, a widely used reference grammar and the first of English in real use rather than structured by rules derived from Greek and Latin models. Quirk and his collaborators proposed a descriptive rather than prescriptive grammar, showing readers that different groups of English speakers choose different usages, and argued that what is correct is what communicates effectively.

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.

This corpus is now known more widely as the London-Lund Corpus (LLC), as it was the responsibility of co-workers in Lund, Sweden, to computerise the corpus. Thirty-four of the spoken texts were published in book form as Svartvik and Quirk (1980), and the corpus was used as the basis for the famous book A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (Quirk et al. 1985).

The Survey was the first to sample written and spoken British English, between 1955 and 1985. A corpus of 1m analysed words, comprising 200 texts each of 5,000 words, it included dialogue and monologue, and written material intended for both reading and reading aloud.

The Survey was a crucial source of input to the Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, the first major study of the real use of English in all its spoken and written domains.

References

1.The British Academy, David Crystal and Ruth Kempson - Charles Randolph Quirk

2.The Survey of English Usage Official Website

3.Lord Quirk's official biography on the UK Parliament website

4.Quirk Randolph. “A comprehensive grammar of the English language” (1985)

5.Randolph Quirk Memorial Website

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