A number of quite basic categories and concepts do not seem to have been thought through with sufficient care; this results in a remarkable amount of unclarity and inconsistency in the analysis, and in the organization of the grammar.

[3] A board of consultants comprised Barry Blake, Bernard Comrie, Greville Corbett, Edward Finegan, John Lyons, Peter Matthews, Keith Mitchell, Frank Palmer, John Payne, Neil Smith, Roland Sussex, and the late James D.

"[3] Ostensibly, it is written for a reader with no background in English grammar or linguistics, though, as Leech notes, "in practice the intensity of detail, including much unfamiliar terminology, is likely to deter the nonspecialist.

[7][clarification needed] Every node in the phrase structure tree is denoted with a category label, either lexical or phrasal.

Here, CamGEL claims that the function of determiner, modifier, or predeterminer may be "fused" with the head, as in the poor (see the accompanying diagram).

After a description and general praise, an early (2002) review of CamGEL by Joybrato Mukherjee changed gear with "There are many analyses that I feel uneasy about".

[n 4] Despite calling the book a "notable and outstanding achievement", he wrote that it "comes across as a quaint anachronism: too many axiomatic assumptions (such as a strictly binary-branching constituent structure) are taken for granted prima facie, and the language data are not consistently and systematically obtained from naturally occurring discourse".

[18] In a sharp response, Pullum pointed out that Mukherjee had mischaracterized not only CamGEL but also the two reference grammars he had compared it with, and had made various misunderstandings, among them that "basic" in the particular context meant something other than "syntactically simple".

In addition, the book is a very complete and convincing demonstration that the ideas of modern theoretical linguistics can be deployed in the detailed description of a particular language.

[22]Bas Aarts wrote: "CaGEL is an awe-inspiring tome which offers a comprehensive descriptive account of the grammar of English.

[23] After stating that this is "an important work – well written, impeccably organized, and full of insight into the structure of contemporary standard English", Alan S. Kaye quoted Edward Sapir's adage that "all grammars leak",[n 7] and explored what CamGEL terms the bare genitive: exemplified by "the Jones' car" (as an optional alternative to "the Jones's car"), the genitive inflection signalled by an apostrophe for the reader but phonologically bare for the listener).

[24]: 1595–1596  Kaye argued a number of minor points related to this, among them that what CamGEL presents as for convenience' sake lacked an apostrophe for his American informants.

[25][n 8] Pieter de Haan saw the book as "a series of remarks about syntactic points, which in themselves are generally interesting enough but do not all contribute to a unified description of the language".

Yet, says de Haan: "The flaw in Huddleston's argument is of course that the class of verbs is established independently from the complementation they take, and on quite different grounds, for instance the ability of being marked for tense.

Huddleston and Pullum responded to a number of aspects of de Haan's review, notably by arguing for the coherence of their expanded category of Preposition.

He found that the authors "have done an admirable job, covering a vast range of facts in a theoretical and terminological framework which [is] as a whole certainly more coherent" than that of the older work.

[It] has achieved its major aim because it represents an advance on [A Comprehensive Grammar] – first for the obvious reason that the results of recent research have been incorporated but secondly also because the authors have, on the whole, been successful in their attempt to make the description as theoretically coherent as possible.

[28]Geoffrey Leech wrote: [E]very so often, there appears a book which is important enough to fill the reviewer with something like awe... [Its] strength lies more in being a consolidation and synthesis of existing linguistic theory and description.

The depth and richness of detail, as well as the breadth of coverage, are extraordinarily impressive, so that there is scarcely a topic that grammatical old-timers like myself cannot read without fresh insight and understanding.

[6]: 127, 129  He too noted the Aristotelian framework in pointing out the authors' "determination to arrive at a single correct analysis"[6]: 125  and felt that "the desire to seek a decisive answer to all research questions is too strong, in particular, when examples of borderline acceptability are judged to be either fully grammatical or fully ungrammatical.

"[30] Thomas Herbst [de] praised the fresh approach that the book took to a variety of grammatical phenomena, and recommended the blue-shaded, more advanced discussions to "any student of English linguistics".

[31] In 2004, two years after the book was published, Peter Culicover wrote: The Cambridge grammar of the English language (CGEL) is a monumentally impressive piece of work.