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【英文前言】
Preface
From the time when we started collaborating as a team in the 1960s, we envisaged not a grammar but a series of grammars. In 1972, there appeared the first volume in this series, A Grammar of Contemporary English (GCE). This was followed soon afterwards by two shorter works, A Communicative Grammar of English (CGE) and A University Grammar of English (UGE, published in the United States with the title A Concise Grammar of Contemporary English). These two were in part an abridgment of GCE, but what is more significant is that they were deliberately different both from the parent book and from each other. This is particularly obvious in the case of CGE, which looks at the whole grammar of the language from a semantic and communicative viewpoint. I t is less obviously true of UGE, which follows i the chapter divisions and in most cases the chapter titles of GCE, though in fact the abridgment was accompanied by a good deal of fresh thinking and radical revision.
With A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, we attempt i something much more ambitious: a culmination of our joint work, which results in a grammar that is considerably larger and richer than GCE and hence superordinate to it. Yet, as with our other volumes since GCE, it is also a grammar that incorporates our own further research on grammatical structure as well as the research of scholars world-wide who have contributed to the description of English and to developments in linguistic theory.
It scarcely needs to be said that we take full collective responsibility for the contents of this book. But what does indeed need to be said is that it has been immeasurably improved as a result of the generous assistance that we have received, not least from our own students. We have benefited too from the perceptive attention that GCE, UGE, and CGE have received from reviewers throughout the world. But in addition to these scholars and writers, in addition also to the numerous scholars that we acknowledged in earlier prefaces, a further willing band of linguists put themselves generously at our disposal in giving detailed attention to earlier drafts of what has become A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language.
Some few have even undertaken the heavy task of giving a detailed critique of the entire book in such an earlier draft. For their searching work to this degree, we are especially indebted to John Algeo, R A Close, and Robert de Beaugrande, who between them produced hundreds of pages of invaluable comments. But we are grateful also to W N Francis and Bengt Jacobsson, who gave comparably generous and skilled attention to large parts of the book.
Many other scholars have helped us with one or more individual chapters or with specific problems in the description of grammar. We list their names, but this can in no way convey our degree of gratitude or indicate the intellectual effort from which we have benefited: V Adams, B Altenberg, E Andersson, W-D Bald, D L Bolinger, J Coates, R Cureton, L Haegeman, R i Ilson, S Johansson, H Kakehi (and his Kobe students), H Kinoshita, T Lavelle, B Lott, C F Meyer, T Nevalainen, W J Pepicello, G Stein, J Taglicht, J Thompson, G Tottie, T Waida, K Wales. The fact that some of these friends are among the most eminent experts in the world on American, British, and other varieties of English has contributed beyond measure to the confidence with which we assign such descriptive labels as 'AmE' and 'BrE'.
Finally, we take great pleasure in making clear that David Crystal's role has extended far beyond what is indicated on the title page. He has not merely provided the detailed index which will make 'information retrieval' possible; in addition, in the course of this onerous and highly specialized task, he has contributed pervasively to the correction of error, the standardization of terminology, and the improvement of presentation.
But this Preface would be sadly incomplete if we did not also record our gratitude to the grant-giving bodies whose financial help (over and above the support we have received from University College London, Lund University, - the University of Lancaster, and the University of Wisconsin) has made our research and writing possible: the Leverhulme Trust, the Gulbenkian Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the British Academy, the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation, and our publishers, the Longman Group.
RQ SG GL JS
February 1985
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