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‘Our central aim is to describe Modern Standard English in its standard form’, say the authors of this massive tome. With almost 2,000 pages, weighing in at almost 3 kilos, at a price that would feed a student for several weeks, it is clearly intended for library use.
The book (henceforth CamGEL) ‘aims to bridge the large gap that exists between traditional grammar and the partial descriptions of English grammar proposed by those working in the field of linguistics’, according to the preface. CamGEL does not assume any familiarity with theoretical linguistics on the part of the reader, the authors assert, but significant changes have been made to traditional analyses, so that CamGEL, they claim, reflects the progress made by linguists in the understanding of grammar.
Huddlestone is the major contributor. He is sole author of seven of the book’s twenty chapters, and joint author (with either one or two colleagues) of the remaining thirteen. Pullum, on the other hand, appears as a co-author only, of six chapters.
The twenty chapters cover the major areas within English grammar, and the relevant points are illustrated with examples taken mainly from prose produced since the mid-twentieth century. Special-purpose varieties of English such as newspaper language, poetry, or computer jargon have been excluded.

English Language Test – UMB PTN 2009 Code 210

CamGEL claims to be neutral between spoken and written English, though it states that for practical purposes most examples come from written sources. A number of these sound manufactured, e.g. ‘Kim jumped off the pier’, ‘He emerged from under the bridge’, ‘At no time were we friends’, to quote a random sample. (The name Kim is hugely popular in the book’s examples.) ‘We make frequent use of genuinely attested examples’, the authors claim (p. 12), though made-up examples are not distinguished from real ones, whose sources are never quoted. This is disappointing: private correspondence is likely to sound fairly different from a letter written by a tax inspector; and novels are more colloquial than textbooks.
Optimistically, and not entirely realistically, the authors assume that spoken and written English are close: ‘Thus while we acknowledge a tendency for the exemplification in this grammar to be biased towards written sources, we assume that the goal of providing a description that is neutral between spoken and written English is not an unreasonable one’ (p. 13), they assert. Disappointingly, they claim that access to the British National Corpus (BNC), a database which contains both written and spoken English, was unavailable to scholars working outside the UK until the book was in its almost final form. Disappointingly also, newspaper language has been excluded, which, according to recent statistics, is midway between spoken and written English, and might have provided some of the ‘neutral’ examples the authors were aiming at.
But the book is worth consulting. A plus point is the clear distinction it makes between structure and function. On the diagrams of branching constituent structure, a functional label such as subject, object is routinely included and distinguished from a structural one, such as NP, VP. In such diagrams, the functional label (subject, object, predicate, and so on) is, following CamGEL’s conventions, written in lower-case letters above the structural label, such as NP, VP. Under lexical categories, for example, a category ‘determinative’ is proposed, that includes words such as ‘the’, ‘this’, ‘that’, ‘every’, ‘each’, which most linguists would classify as ‘determiners’. CamGEL does indeed use the word determiner, but restricts its use to a subtype of determinatives. It does this, it asserts, so as to distinguish category labels from functional ones. But such terminological alterations are likely to confuse an unwary beginner. As the ‘determinative’ example indicates, CamGEL’s contents are largely familiar, though slightly skewed to fit in with its own approach.
Inevitably, this book will be compared with other similar volumes. CamGEL is the third major grammar of English to be published in the last twenty years. The first, and best known, was A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (London: Longman, 1985) by Randolph Quirk and his colleagues (Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, and Jan Svartvik), which was essentially descriptive, rather than theoretical, but contained clear, well-documented information on the major features of English grammar. The second was The Grammar of Spoken and Written English (London: Longman, 1999) by Douglas Biber et al. (Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad, and Edward Finegan). This also was descriptive, and covered topics similar to those in Quirk and others. Its most important feature was that it contained detailed information based on ‘real’ data, since it made use of a genuine corpus of spoken and written English. It also provided figures for the distribution of items in different registers, information which could not have been guessed, and was in some cases counter-intuitive.
CamGEL contains less information about spoken English, lacking both Quirk and others’ appendix on stress, rhythm, and intonation, and Biber and others’ examples of spoken English. CamGEL aims to be more ‘theoretical’–though in some cases this means ‘less user-friendly’. For example, potentially useful but in practice possibly confusing sections are those on truth conditions and entailment. The eyes of student linguists are likely to glaze over when they read in the first chapter (labelled ‘Preliminaries’) information such as: ‘If X entails Y then X cannot be true unless Y is true. So to give the entailments of a sentence is to give its truth conditions’ (p. 35).
In some cases, CamGEL wins out over the others. A useful chapter is one on ‘Information Packaging’ (chapter 16, pp. 1363 ff.), an area of linguistics which has seen great steps forward in recent years. The topic was dealt with reasonably well in the other grammars, though was less crisply handled, with less straightforward terminology.
Elsewhere, CamGEL falls down by attempting to be oversensitive. It is standard for linguists to distinguish between deontic modality, expressing permission or obligation, as in ‘You can/must go’, and epistemic modality, expressing a speaker’s assessment of a situation: ‘You must be tired.’ To this, CamGEL adds a further type, ‘dynamic modality’, though the examples are somewhat unclear, and as the text admits, ‘The boundary between dynamic and deontic modality is [...] somewhat fuzzy’ (p. 179).
Ideally, anyone would use them side by side. Biber and others would (as now) be the second, with its useful real-corpus examples, and related statistics; it also links in well with Quirk and others. CamGEL would have third place. Its terminology needs to be approached with care and a clear head, it is disappointing in its lack of spoken examples, and in its failure to document the source of its written examples. In some ways, this book reminds one of those who advocate spelling reform: English spelling is indeed far from perfect. But sweeping the current system aside would cause more problems than retaining it. Similarly, brushing away current grammar books and terminology, and replacing them with a different version, is not a truly viable option. Minor tidying up may be all that is feasible.
To conclude, this book has its heart, or more accurately, its intentions, in the right place. Any researcher or future grammar-writer will find much of value. But for the average student, the learning curve which it necessitates is too steep, and the data on which it is based are too vague. One can perhaps look forward to a second edition, a few years hence, which retains the most useful sections, irons out some of the obscurities, gives some real, referenced, examples, and discusses more fully where CamGEL clashes with or corresponds to other grammars of English.
JEAN AITCHISON WORCESTER COLLEGE, OXFORD
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COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning