Talk:The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language

Citing the book
Let's say I want to cite something on page 1361 of this book. (For those unfamiliar with the book, its title page names two authors, "in collaboration with" a list of other authors. Each of its twenty chapters is clearly attributed to one or more authors.) I can think of two ways of doing this: like this or like this.

I don't much like either, but mildly prefer the latter, cumbersome though it is. Comments? (?) -- Hoary (talk) 12:13, 1 March 2023 (UTC)
 * In principle, if the part of a book you're citing is in a chapter with its own authors, you should cite the chapter rather than just the book. Nardog (talk) 13:44, 1 March 2023 (UTC)
 * I've seen both in journals, though "Huddleston & Pullum" is by far the most common.--Brett (talk) 13:48, 1 March 2023 (UTC)


 * Yup, I agree with both of you. I'll switch to the latter, more prolix style, unless anyone pipes up within the next day or so to dissuade me from doing so. -- Hoary (talk) 02:20, 2 March 2023 (UTC)

"CGEL" (or a better name)
CGEL (usually but not always italicized) is used both for this book and for A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. And therefore making "CGEL" a disambiguation page is helpful and proper. CGEL could also be used within this article, and within the article on A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, to refer to the book that's the subject. OK -- until a reader jumps from either of these two articles to the other, whereupon, of course, the referent of CGEL too would change.

Here are all the reviews of "this CGEL" that I've encountered so far. For each:. Thus for example Jean Aitchison, writing in Modern Language Review, uses CamGEL for this book and "Quirk and others" (without quotation marks, of course) for the slightly older book.


 * Aarts (Journal of Linguistics): CaGEL
 * Aitchison (Modern Language Review): CamGEL (Quirk and others)
 * Bex (Language and Literature): CGEL
 * Brew (Computational Linguistics): Cambridge Grammar
 * Burridge (Australian Book Review): The Cambridge Grammar
 * Crystal (The Indexer): the 'Cambridge' (the Quirk grammar)
 * Culicover (Language): CGEL
 * de Haan (English Studies): [none]
 * Griffiths (Guardian): the Cambridge Grammar
 * Herbst (Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik): CamG
 * Kaye (English Today): CGEL
 * Leech (English Language and Linguistics) H&P (Q et al.)
 * Mair (AAA: Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik): CG (ACGEL)
 * Millar (Journal of Germanic Linguistics): the Grammar
 * Morris (Canadian Journal of Linguistics): CamG (CompG)
 * Mukherjee (Linguist List): the Cambridge Grammar (the Comprehensive Grammar)
 * Shaffer (Korea TESOL Journal): CamGram (CompGram)

Our article A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language doesn't currently use any abbreviation for that title. But if any editor cares to expand that article, it surely will use some abbreviation.

I suggest that and  are used in this article; and  and  are used in the other one. But most of the other abbreviations that reviewers have devised would be OK. (However, what might be called "minimal pairs" -- such as CamGEL and ComGEL -- would I think be better avoided.) Comments? (?)

(I'd also be happy to learn of any other reviews, or quasi-reviews.) -- Hoary (talk) 07:55, 6 March 2023 (UTC)


 * I think CamGEL and Q et al and CompGEL and H&P are good choices. Brett (talk) 11:46, 6 March 2023 (UTC)


 * I've thought a bit more about this. Unless/until Quirk et al's big book is cited a lot more frequently than it is now, I think that "Q et al" would be unnecessarily confusing. (And I fear that something somewhere in the "MoS" would demand a period ("Q et al", which in some places may risk being mistaken for a sentence terminator.) In its place, I suggest A Comprehensive Grammar. If tokens of this ever proliferate, search-'n'-replace will make it easy to switch to "Q et al" or some other short alternative. -- Hoary (talk) 05:55, 8 March 2023 (UTC)

Shoddy reviews
I don't think the Mukherjee and Haan reviews are really worth including. There are plenty of worthwhile criticisms without resorting to the erroneous ones. Brett (talk) 14:18, 7 March 2023 (UTC)


 * Yes, they're poor -- not just in the sense of "unfavorable" but also, yes, "shoddy". I'm unenthusiastic about including them. But I don't want it to seem as if this WP article has implemented a bias and removed mention of the least favorable reviews (either because they're the least favorable or because they were slammed by the book's authors). Not really knowing what to do about them in the medium term, I added the relevant paragraphs thinking that I'd see what they looked like and later perhaps whittle them down or remove them completely. If it were just me editing this article, I'd let them sit for a week and then look at them afresh; however, it's not just me and it's certainly not "my" article: any time you'd like to wield your editorial machete on them, do please go ahead. -- Hoary (talk) 05:38, 8 March 2023 (UTC)