Relative Clauses

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

Brings to light largely unreported and unanalysed types of non-standard relative clauses in everyday English. A sophisticated and empirically rich analysis, it will be of interest to researchers and students working on syntax, the English language, language variation, corpus linguistics, experimental linguistics, and language change.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.