Relative Clauses: Structure and Variation in Everyday English

By Andrew Radford

Book Overview

Using novel examples from live, unscripted radio/TV broadcasts and the internet, this path-breaking book will force us to reconsider the nature of everyday English and its complex interplay of syntactic, pragmatic, sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic factors. Uncovering unusual types of non-standard relative clauses, Andrew Radford develops theoretically sophisticated analyses in an area that has traditionally hardly been touched on: that of nonstandard (yet not clearly dialectal) variation in English. Making sense of a huge amount of data, the book demonstrates that some types of non-standard relative clauses have a complex syntactic structure of their own in which the relation between the relative clause and its antecedent is either syntactically encoded or pragmatic in nature, while others come about as a result of hypercorrection, and yet others arise from processing errors.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1108492800
• ISBN13: 9781108492805
• Release Date: August 2019
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Length: 324 Pages
• Weight: 1.34 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 9.0"