Relative Clauses
Structure and Variation in Everyday English

A sophisticated analysis of non-standard relative clauses in everyday English, using novel data from live, unscripted radio/TV broadcasts and the internet.

Andrew Radford (Author)

9781108729680, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 20 June 2019

324 pages
22.8 x 15.2 x 1.9 cm, 0.48 kg

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.

Prologue
1. Background
2. Resumptive relatives
3. Prepositional relatives
4. Gapless relatives
Epilogue.

Subject Areas: Grammar, syntax & morphology [CFK], Semantics, discourse analysis, etc [CFG], Linguistics [CF], Language: history & general works [CBX]