A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language

A descriptive grammar of English written by Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, and Jan Svartvik, with indexing by David Crystal. It was first published by Longman 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: the Survey of English Usage, the Lancaster-Oslo-Bergen Corpus (UK English), and the Brown Corpus (US English). There was some criticism of it; e.g. in 1988, Rodney Huddleston wrote: "[T]here are some respects in which it is seriously flawed and disappointing. A number of quite basic categories and concepts do not seem to have been thought through with sufficient care; this results in a remarkable amount of unclarity and inconsistency in the analysis, and in the organization of the grammar." It was reprinted (primarily for the Indian/South Asian market) in 2010 by Pearson (new cover, but not significant revision).