This chapter throws new light upon besides as a connective in contemporary
English. Using examples extracted from corpora, we consider how to reconcile
the notions of “tangentiality” and “decisiveness” found in existing descriptions
of its function. After an assessment of the only previous… read more
Within Functional Grammar it has been claimed that a small set of languages, including Polish and Dutch, may have a special clause-final position reserved for certain kinds of Focus constituents. But it has also been suggested that there is insufficient evidence to establish whether this is… read more
This paper looks at patterning in multiple themes in written English. Adopting a view of theme in declarative SVO clauses which extends up to the grammatical subject and its non-restrictive postmodifications, and building on an earlier study by Smits (2002), it uses corpus data to identify three… read more
In modelling the discourse–grammar interface, a central question concerns the status of discourse act as the minimal unit of discourse organization and its relation to units of grammatical structure. This paper seeks to clarify the notion of act by defining it as a strategic rather than a… read more