Relative Clauses: Structure and Variation in Everyday English

Description

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.

Andrew Radford is Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at the University of Essex. His many books include Minimalist Syntax (Cambridge, 2004), Analysing English Sentences (Cambridge, 2nd edition, 2016) and Colloquial English: Structure and Variation (Cambridge, 2018).