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The Lord Quirk of Bloomsbury | |
|---|---|
 Lord Quirk in 2016 | |
| Member of theHouse of Lords | |
| Life peerage 12 July 1994 – 20 December 2017 | |
| Vice-Chancellor of University of London | |
| In office 1981–1985 | |
| Preceded by | Lord Annan |
| Succeeded by | Lord Flowers |
| Personal details | |
| Born | Charles Randolph Quirk (1920-07-12)12 July 1920 |
| Died | 20 December 2017(2017-12-20) (aged 97) |
| Nationality | British |
| Education | St Ninian's High School, Douglas |
| Alma mater | Yale University University College London Michigan State University |
| Occupation | Linguist |
| Military service | |
| Allegiance |  United Kingdom |
| Branch/service | |
| Years of service | 1940–1945 |
| Rank | Squadron leader |
| Unit | Bomber Command |
Charles Randolph Quirk, Baron Quirk (12 July 1920 – 20 December 2017) was a British linguist and politician. He was theQuain Professor of English language and literature atUniversity College London from 1968 to 1981.[1] He sat as acrossbencher in theHouse of Lords.[2]
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Quirk was born at his family's farm, Lambfell, nearKirk Michael on theIsle of Man, where his family farmed, the son of Thomas and Amy Randolph Quirk.[3] He attendedDouglas High School for Boys on the island and then went toUniversity College London (UCL) to read English (the department relocated toAberystwyth due to thewar)[3] underA.H. Smith. His studies began in 1939 but were interrupted in 1940 by five years of service inBomber Command of theRAF,[3] where he rose to the rank ofsquadron leader.
Quirk became so deeply interested in explosives that he started an external degree in chemistry,[3] but his English undergraduate studies were completed from 1945 to 1947 (with the department back inBloomsbury) 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.[3] In this period he completed hisMA onphonology and his PhD thesis onsyntax, and in 1951 became a post-doctoralCommonwealth Fund fellow atYale University andMichigan State University.[3] Shortly after his return from the US in 1952, he moved to theUniversity of Durham,[3] becomingreader there in 1954, and professor in 1958.[citation needed] He returned to UCL as professor in 1960 and in 1968 succeeded Smith asQuain Professor, a post he held until 1981.
Quirk lectured and gave seminars at UCL inOld English (Anglo-Saxon) and the History of the English Language. These two disciplines were part of a ten-discipline set offinal 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 withA. C. Gimson andJ. 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 ofDoctor of Letters by theUniversity of Bath.[4]
In 1959, Quirk founded theSurvey of English Usage, working with Valerie Adams, Derek Davy andDavid Crystal; they sampled written and spokenBritish 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 ofA 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 fromGreek andLatin 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.[citation needed] The work was groundbreaking, though one proposed flaw is that the examples used were written by the scholars, not collected from texts, as preferred by one of the tutors at the Summer School, Edward Black.[citation needed]
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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[by whom?] 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 in aCockney accent over a "couple of pints". 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 aCommander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the1976 New Year Honours,[6] and wasknighted in 1985.[7] He had openly been aLabour supporter all his life, although he sat in theHouse of Lords as across-bench peer.[8] He was President of theBritish Academy from 1985 to 1989 and became alife peer asBaron Quirk, ofBloomsbury in theLondon Borough of Camden on 12 July 1994.[8][9] He sat on the boards of Pearson Education and the Linguaphone Institute.[8]
Until his death, in 2017, he resided in Germany and England. His second wife was the German linguist Gabriele Stein. She died on 6 March 2020.[10]
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| Preceded by | Vice-Chancellor of University of London 1981–1985 | Succeeded by |
