Professor Randolph Quirk is no more.
The legendary British linguist, whose Comprehensive Grammar of the
English Language was the first major attempt at studying real-world
English in its spoken and written forms, died on the 20th of this month
(Wednesday) at the ripe old age of 97.
Here are two obituary notices:
I remember two incidents about Professor Quirk. One of them is a piece of
information my friend, Professor Makhan Lal Tickoo, shared with me over a
decade ago. He said that when he was at London University in the early 1960s,
he was fortunate enough to be part of Prof Quirk's project team. And the
project, A Survey of Modern English Usage, was a mammoth one which Prof Quirk
conducted with some of the leading linguists of the time, including
Sidney Greenbaum, John Svartvik, and Geoffrey Leech. Three decades later, the
survey resulted in the book, Comprehensive
Grammar.
The second incident concerns a
linguist whom I hero-worship. David Crystal as a linguist is much more popular
than Baron Quirk. But he talks about Prof Quirk with admiration bordering on
workship. In 1960, David was a second-year student at the University College of
London. Having listened to infinitely boring lectures for a year at UCL, he was
wondering whether he shouldn't discontinue his studies when Prof Randolph Quirk
came. Listening to him, David was fascinated. Here are Professor Crystal's own
words:
'He came in in my second year. He
gives one lecture and I was a convert. He blasted into the room ... It was down
to his magnetism, his enthusiasm and charisma. He had it. There’s no question
about it.'
Professor Quirk will be missed.
