Description

Book Synopsis
Drawing on vast amounts of new data from live, unscripted radio and TV broadcasts, and the internet, this is a brilliant and original analysis of colloquial English, revealing unusual and largely unreported types of clause structure. Andrew Radford debunks the myth that colloquial English has a substandard, simplified grammar, and shows that it has a coherent and complex structure of its own. The book develops a theoretically sophisticated account of structure and variation in colloquial English, advancing an area that has been previously investigated from other perspectives, such as corpus linguistics or conversational analysis, but never before in such detail from a formal syntactic viewpoint.

Trade Review
'Lucid, magisterial, encyclopaedic; it covers a huge amount of material and makes sense of horrendously complex data.' Neil Smith, University College London
'Radford demonstrates convincingly that colloquial English is as theoretically interesting and descriptively challenging as standard English. Expressing yourself informally does not exempt you from the constraints of Universal grammar.' Jan Terje Faarlund, University of Oslo

Table of Contents
Prologue; 1. Background; 2. Topics; 3. Complementisers; 4. How come?; Epilogue.

Colloquial English Structure and Variation 158 Cambridge Studies in Linguistics Series Number 158

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    A Paperback by Andrew Radford

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      View other formats and editions of Colloquial English Structure and Variation 158 Cambridge Studies in Linguistics Series Number 158 by Andrew Radford

      Book details

      Publisher Cambridge University Press
      Published 14 June 2018
      ISBN-13 9781108448697
      978-1108448697
      Also in:
      Dictionaries, Reference & Language Dialect, slang and jargon Sociolinguistics Usage and grammar guides

      Description

      Book Synopsis
      Drawing on vast amounts of new data from live, unscripted radio and TV broadcasts, and the internet, this is a brilliant and original analysis of colloquial English, revealing unusual and largely unreported types of clause structure. Andrew Radford debunks the myth that colloquial English has a substandard, simplified grammar, and shows that it has a coherent and complex structure of its own. The book develops a theoretically sophisticated account of structure and variation in colloquial English, advancing an area that has been previously investigated from other perspectives, such as corpus linguistics or conversational analysis, but never before in such detail from a formal syntactic viewpoint.

      Trade Review
      'Lucid, magisterial, encyclopaedic; it covers a huge amount of material and makes sense of horrendously complex data.' Neil Smith, University College London
      'Radford demonstrates convincingly that colloquial English is as theoretically interesting and descriptively challenging as standard English. Expressing yourself informally does not exempt you from the constraints of Universal grammar.' Jan Terje Faarlund, University of Oslo

      Table of Contents
      Prologue; 1. Background; 2. Topics; 3. Complementisers; 4. How come?; Epilogue.

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