Survey of English Usage
During the early 1960s, Randolph Quirk and colleagues, among them Valerie Adams, Derek Davy and David Crystal, conducted an ambitious project known as the Survey of English Usage. This compilation of a large body of English language data (a corpus) comprised one million words as recorded in actual use in everyday life. Previous grammars had tended to overuse the canon of English Literature. The project was to be the foundation of A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, a reference grammar widely used around the world. This was the first grammar of English in real use rather than one based on rules handed down by teachers and scholars from Latin and Greek models. These had been considered to be "correct" models for living English. Instead of declaring what was correct grammatical usage, Quirk and his collaborators proposed a descriptive rather than prescriptive grammar, showing readers that different groups of English speakers chose different usages, arguing that what is correct is what communicates effectively. Basil Bernstein, sociolinguist, made his name from showing similar choices of variants of English usage.
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