Neal Goldfarb in SCOTUS cites CGEL (Props to Justice Gorsuch and the Supreme Court library) highlights two comprehensive grammars for English.
Both are known by the initials CGEL:
- Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (2002), Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey Pullum
- Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (1985), by Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, and Jan Svartvik
Being the more recent work, Cambridge Grammar of the English Language lists today for $279.30 (1860 pages), whereas Quirk’s 1985 Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, can be had for $166.08 (1779 pages).
Interesting fact, the acronym CGEL was in use for 17 years by Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language before Cambridge Grammar of the English Language was published, using the same acronym.
Curious how much new information was added by the Cambridge grammar? If you had a machine readable text of both, excluded the examples and then calculated the semantic distance between sections on the same material, you could produce a measurement of the distance between the two texts.
Given the prices of academic texts, standardizing a method of comparison would be a boon to scholars and graduate students!
(No comment on the over-writing of the acronym for Quirk’s work by Cambridge.)