Colloquial English
Colloquial English
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.
- Provides a brilliant analysis of colloquial English, both its syntax and its variations
- Uses new data from live, unscripted radio and TV broadcasts and the internet
- An invaluable resource for researchers and students working on syntactic structure and variation
- Enables researchers and students to make sense of complex sets of data
Reviews & endorsements
‘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
Product details
July 2018Hardback
9781108428057
344 pages
235 × 156 × 22 mm
0.61kg
Available
Table of Contents
- Prologue
- 1. Background
- 2. Topics
- 3. Complementisers
- 4. How come?
- Epilogue.
