Towards A Contextual Grammar Of English

This study, first published in 1982, attempts to show that the foundations of a contextual grammar of English must be firmly based on an adequate definition of the sentence. This book will be of interest to students of language and linguistics.

"Text and Technology" focuses on three major areas of modern linguistics: discourse analysis, corpus-driven analysis of language, and computational linguistics. The volume starts off with a description of the various British traditions in text analysis by Michael Stubbs. The first section Spoken and Written Discourse contains contributions by Martin Warren, Mohd Dahan Hazadiah., Amy B.M. Tsui, Anna Mauranen and Susan Hunston. The next section on corpus-driven analysis Corpus Studies: Theory and Practice contains contributions by Gill Francis, Bill Louw, Allan Partington, Elena Tognini-Bonelli. The contributions in this section by Kirsten Malmkjaer and Mona Baker deal specifically with translated text. The final third section Text and Technology: Computational Tools has contributions by David Coniam, Jeremy Clear, Junsaku Nakamura, Geoff Barnbrook and Margaret Allen. In spite of the specialised nature of the topics discussed and the level of sophistication with which these topcis are handled, the papers are written in a clear and accessible style and will therefore be of interest to seasoned scholars and students alike. An extensive index further enhances the value of this collection as a reference point for many of the issues that currently lie at the heart of modern linguistics enquiry

English Grammar in Context takes a building block approach by covering words, phrases, clauses, and sentence structure in its first four parts. Sections on punctuation and errors follow for easy reference and flexible use. The book is distinguished by its constant emphasis on how grammar is applied to clear writing. Helpful workbook sections for the reader are always in the context of longer pieces of discourse and show that grammar always functions in a context beyond the sentence. Each chapter begins with a pretest to allow readers to assess their own ability on a particular topic. A progression of increasingly challenging exercises follows, and each chapter concludes with a summary. Anyone interested in perfecting their grammar knowledge and usage.

Language and Context breaks new ground in our understanding of the relationship between register, genre and context. Leckie-Tarry argues convincingly and engagingly for a functional theory of language which specifies register in terms of contextual and linguistic features, and which suggests a discursive relationship between the two. Moving beyond the limits of much of today's theory, this accessible volume develops a theoretical understanding of the relationship between text, context, langage function and linguistic form. Helen Leckie-Tarry, a specialist in the area of 'register and applied linguistics', died in 1991, aged 49. Although she had finished a large part of this work, her notes and draft chapters have been extensively edited by Professor David Birch. David Birch is currently Professor of Communication and media Studies at Central Queensland University, Australia, and previously taught at Murdoch University, Western Australia, and the National University of Singapore.

This collected volume brings together a wide array of international linguists working on diachronic language change with a specific focus on the history of English, who work within usage-based frameworks and investigate processes of grammatical change in context. Although usage-based linguistics emphasizes the centrality of the discourse context for language usage and cognition, this insight has not been fully integrated into the investigation of processes of grammatical variation and change. The structuralist heritage as well as corpus linguistic methodologies have favoured de-contextualized analytical perspectives on contemporary and historical language data and on the mechanisms and processes guiding grammatical variation and change. From a range of different perspectives, the contributions to this volume take up the challenge of contextualization in the investigation of grammatical variation and change in different stages of English language history and discuss central theoretical notions such as gradable grammaticality, motivation in hypervariation, and hypercharacterization. The book will be relevant to students and linguists working in the field of diachronic and variational linguistics and English language history.

This collection brings together the authors' previous research with new work on the Register-Functional (RF) approach to grammatical complexity, offering a unified theoretical account for its further study. The book traces the development of the RF approach from its foundations in two major research strands of linguistics: the study of sociolinguistic variation and the text-linguistic study of register variation. Building on this foundation, the authors demonstrate the RF framework at work across a series of corpus-based research studies focused specifically on grammatical complexity in English. The volume highlights early work exploring patterns of grammatical complexity in present-day spoken and written registers as well as subsequent studies which extend this research to historical patterns of register variation and the application of RF research to the study of writing development for L1 and L2 English university students. Taken together, along with the addition of introductory chapters connecting the different studies, the volume offers readers with a comprehensive resource to better understand the RF approach to grammatical complexity and its implications for future research. The volume will appeal to students and scholars with research interests in either descriptive linguistics or applied linguistics, especially those interested in grammatical complexity and empirical, corpus-based approaches.

Development & theories of English Grammar.