Charles Randolph Quirk, Baron Quirk, CBE, FBA (born 12 July 1920) is a British linguist and life

[1]
peer. He was the Quain Professor of English language and literature at University College London from 1968
to 1981. He currently sits as a crossbencher in the House of Lords.
Quirk was born at Lambfell, where his family farmed,[2] in the parish of Michael on the Isle of Man, the
son of Thomas and Amy Randolph Quirk. He attended Douglas High School for Boys on the island and then
went to University College London (UCL) to read English (the department relocated to Aberystwyth due to
the war)[2] under A. H. Smith. His studies began in 1939 but were interrupted in 1940 by five years of service
in Bomber Command of the RAF,[2] where he rose to the rank of squadron leader.[citation needed] He became so
deeply interested in explosives that he started an external degree in chemistry,[2] but his English undergraduate
studies were completed from 1945 to 1947 (with the department back in Bloomsbury) and was then invited to
take up a research fellowship in Cambridge; however he took up a counter-offer of a junior lectureship at UCL,
which he held until 1952.[2] In this period he completed his MA on phonology and his PhD thesis on syntax,
and in 1951 became a post-doctoral Commonwealth Fund fellow at Yale University and Michigan State
University.[2] Shortly after his return from the US in 1952, he moved to the University of
Durham,[2] becoming reader there in 1954, and professor in 1958.[citation needed] He returned to UCL as professor
in 1960 and in 1968 succeeded Smith as Quain Professor, a post he held until 1981.
Quirk lectured and gave seminars at UCL in Old English (Anglo-Saxon) and the History of the English
Language. These two disciplines were part of a ten-discipline set of final examinations in the undergraduate
syllabus. At that time Old and Middle English, along with History of the English Language, were all
compulsory subjects in that course. He also worked closely with A.C. Gimson and J.D. O'Connor of the
Phonetics Department, sometimes sitting in as an examiner for Phonetics oral examinations.
In 1985, he was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters by the University of Bath
In 1959, Quirk founded the Survey of English Usage.[4] This ambitious project, early co-workers on
which included Valerie Adams, Derek Davy and David Crystal, sampled written and spoken British
English produced between 1955 and 1985. The corpus comprises 200 texts, each of 5,000 words. The spoken
texts include dialogue and monologue, and the written texts material intended for both reading and reading
aloud.[5] The project was to be the foundation of A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, a widely
used reference grammar and the first of English in real use rather than structured by rules derived
from Greek and Latin models.[citation needed] Quirk and his collaborators proposed a descriptive rather than
prescriptive grammar, showing readers that different groups of English speakers choose different usages, and
argued that what is correct is what communicates effectively.
One of Quirk's favourite enterprises was the London University Summer School of English, where the
above-mentioned colleagues and other budding scholars and friends of his came to teach for a month. It was
considered[citation needed] the most eminent body of English teachers anywhere in the world. The resident students
were foreign academics, teachers and students. He threw himself into the social life with gusto and enjoyed
singing Victorian ballads over a "couple of pints" with a Cockney accent. When the School moved away from
Queen Elizabeth College to New Cross, numbers fell rapidly. The next and last successful Director was the
phonetician J D O'Connor.
Quirk was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 1976 New Year
Honours,[6] and was knighted in 1985.[7]
Quirk has been a Labour supporter openly all his life, although he sits in the House of Lords as a cross-
bench peer.[8] He was President of the British Academy from 1985 to 1989 and became a life peer as Baron
Quirk, of Bloomsbury in the London Borough of Camden on 12 July 1994.[8][9] He sits on the boards of
Pearson Education and the Linguaphone Institute.[8]
He currently resides in Germany and England, with his wife, German linguist[10] Gabriele Stein.
 Ferdinand de Saussure, 1857-1913. Ferdinand de Saussure was born in Geneva into a family of well-
known scientists. He studied Sanskrit and comparative linguistics in Geneva, Paris, and Leipzig, where he fell
in with the circle of young scholars known as the Neogrammarians. Brugmann, in particular, was his mentor,
but he was also close to Karl Verner and others of the circle.

In 1878, at the age of 21, Saussure published a long and precocious paper called "Note on the Primitive
System of the Indo-European Vowels". He explained in greater and clearer detail than others who were coming
to similar conclusions how the PIE ablaut system worked. (Ablaut is the ancient system of vowel alternations in
the parent language, visible in surviving irregular alternations among cognates like Latin ped vs. Greek pod,
'foot'; and also in the Germanic strong verb system in exemplified by vowel alternates like sing, sang, sung).
One of the most inspired parts of his analysis is the positing of 'sonorant co-efficients', consonantal
elements that do not appear in any daughter language but can be hypothesized due to the systematic way the
vowels are affected in the descendent languages, and due to position and distribution of such elements in the
rest of the PIE system. The great 20th century Indo-Europeanist Jerzy Kurylowicz later pointed out that Hittite,
the last-discovered ancient Indo-European language, had consonants in just the positions predicted by
Saussure's analysis. These consonants are now called laryngeals, and the study of laryngeals, bringing to bear
more recent evidence than Saussure had access to, is still an important area of Indo-European studies.
This brilliant start was not followed by any tremendous output of published work, but it contained the
seeds of his essential insight into the importance of the linguistic system and how central it is for understanding
human knowledge and behavior. De Saussure was only eight years younger than Karl Brugmann, and he died
some years earlier than Brugmann; yet because of his re-focussing of attention onto aspects of language that
had not been part of the older field, he seems to belong to a later generation. His ideas fit into a recognizably
modern era in which human phenomena are no longer viewed primarily from the point of view of their
construed trajectory through time, but as structural wholes that are self-contained and whose parts fill
interrelated functions.
Saussure's influence on linguists was far-reaching, first through his direct influence on his students at the
University of Geneva, who practically worshipped him, and then through his ideas as collected and
disseminated after his death by two of his students, Charles Bally and Albert Sechaye These students, who
became well-known linguistic researchers in their own right, put together course notes from their and another
student's notebooks to produce the Cours de Linguistique Generale, based on several of Saussure's courses of
lectures at Geneva, using the notebooks of various students attending. This composite work, shaped and
interpreted by Bally and Sechaye, was prepared in the years immediately following Saussure's death as a tribute
and as a way making his brilliant ideas accessible beyond Geneva and for posterity. It worked: the Cours was
widely read in French by scholars all over Europe, and in 1959 was translated into English by Wade Baskin
mainly for American students, who were less likely to have learned to read French than their European
counterparts. A new translation of the Cours by Roy Harris appeared in 1986.
Saussure's fresh ideas were consonant with those of his influental compatriot Claude Levi-Strauss, and
also those of Emile Durkheim, pioneer of the new field of sociology. Saussure's influence spread all through the
new social sciences in the early and mid-twentieth century, and ultimately, for better or worse, to literary theory
and modern cultural studies. They still exert a very strong intellectual force in all these disciplines (probably
most in Linguistics and the disciplines most influenced by literary theory; less so now in traditional
Anthropology, Sociology, and Psychology).
In Linguistics, Saussure's focus on the synchronic dimension and on language as an interrelated system of
elements was maintained through the American Structuralist period (Bloomfield, Hockett), and also in the
Generative period (Chomsky, Bresnan). His view of the essential nature of the form-meaning pairing, without
the intermediate and essentiallly meaningless syntactic layer posited by Chomsky, Perlmutter, and other
generative theory-builders, has re-emerged in theories like Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (Sag and
Pollard) and Construction Grammar.
Modern Functionalist theories have integrated diachrony much more than generative theories (cf. the
Functional Typology of Greenberg, Givón, Comrie, Heine, and Bybee), but the focus on the synchronic has
nevertheless been essentially maintained in modern Cognitive theories of language, in keeping with the
synchronic view of the human mind in the Cognitive Sciences, notably Psychology and Neuroscience.