Colloquial English
Structure and Variation

A brilliant analysis of colloquial English, both its syntax and its variations, using novel data from live, unscripted radio and TV broadcasts and the internet.

Andrew Radford (Author)

9781108448697, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 14 June 2018

344 pages
22.8 x 15.3 x 1.8 cm, 0.51 kg

'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

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.

Prologue
1. Background
2. Topics
3. Complementisers
4. How come?
Epilogue.

Subject Areas: Grammar, syntax & morphology [CFK], Dialect, slang & jargon [CFFD], Sociolinguistics [CFB], Usage & grammar guides [CBG]