The Boy From the Isle of Man

One sign that your future may lie in linguistics is having a serious interest both in languages and in scientific analysis of structure (chemical or mathematical, for example). Such a conflict confronted a farm boy from the Isle of Man in 1945. Five years’ service in the Bomber Command of the Royal Air Force had given him an intellectual interest in the science of explosives, and he had enrolled in a course in chemistry. But he also wanted to resume the degree course in English that his war service had interrupted.

He was wiser and more disciplined than I was at a comparable age. (My disappointment at being unable to follow both science and languages in high school was part of what caused me to lose interest and drop out, a bad mistake that cost me time and trouble to repair later, as mentioned here.) With a dedication to hard work and a skeptical attitude toward orthodoxies that he said he owed to his background, he plotted a sensible course.

He completed that B.A. in English without losing interest in science; found work as a junior lecturer; learned some linguistics; gained an M.A. and a Ph.D.; visited the United States on a Harkness Fellowship (Yale University and the University of Michigan); obtained a faculty position at the University of Durham; published (with C. L. Wrenn) a respected grammar of Old English; returned to London as a professor at University College; radically changed the relations between English language and linguistics; was elected a fellow (and president) of the British Academy; became vice chancellor of the University of London; was made an honorary Doctor of Letters and a Commander of the Order of the British Empire; received a knighthood for services to higher education; and finally was made a lord, specifically a baron. By 1994 he was Baron Quirk of Bloomsbury, C.B.E., B.A., M.A., Ph.D., D.Litt., F.B.A.

As a linguist, Randolph Quirk founded and led the Survey of English Usage, devoted to gathering hard evidence about the use of the spoken and written language. He and a group of colleagues then made good use of the data in producing a series of grammar books, culminating in A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (Longman, 1985). It’s a rich and detailed work, well worth its place on every linguist’s bookshelf. But it has faults. It is not always theoretically coherent or consistent, as Rodney Huddleston argued in a respectful but devastating review in Language (64, 345–354, 1988; free to read online here). Huddleston decided reluctantly that the task of writing a full description of English syntax founded on modern conceptions of both data and theory would have to be tackled again.

That decision led to the writing of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Quirk’s indirect role in its creation was indispensable: He had provided a kind of feasibility proof. His indefatigable energy had shown that in principle, with a little help from some friends, a person could complete a 1,700-page reference grammar of English and live to tell the tale. (It’s not a given. Otto Jespersen died before Part 7 of his great Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles was sent to press in 1949.)

Lord Quirk was kind enough to praise The Cambridge Grammar warmly when it was published in 2002. That was typical of his generosity and openness to new developments. His recent death (December 20, 2017) took from us a universally respected scholar whose charisma and determination had revitalized the scientific study of English. His enthusiastic mentoring had launched the careers of numerous other British linguists, many now distinguished in their own right. And as a vice chancellor and an active House of Lords member, he had gone on to make much broader contributions to education at all levels in Britain.

I treasure a letter he sent me, on House of Lords notepaper, in 2004. He knew that I was appalled at the way the linguistic inadequacies in the theory of personal names built into mail-merge software leads to mangling of addressee lines. He regaled me with stories of some of the name botches on mass mailings he had received. My favorite (and his, too) was a personalized letter to House of Lords members from the minister in charge of Defra, Britain’s Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs. Giving his name and title correctly as “The Lord Quirk” at the top, the software had proceeded to fill in “Dear The” as its salutation. Nice robotic try at getting on first-name terms!

This appealed to his strong sense of humor; but he also saw the linguistic point, and kindly took the time to share it with me because he knew I would be interested. And then he got on with another busy day of parliamentary work: The Lord Quirk to strangers, but always “Randolph” (never “The”) to his many friends.

For a while the above post said Quirk died in 2016 instead of 2017. Just a typo. Sorry. —GKP