This chapter investigates the use of there-clefts without a subject relativizer (e.g. There’s a man came into the bar) in contemporary British English, a much neglected construction that is often dismissed as non-standard. Using data from the Spoken British National Corpus 2014, the study shows… read more
Discourse markers exhibit a range of grammatical properties that set them apart from many other lexical and grammatical forms. A number of hypotheses have been proposed to account for these properties. Most commonly, such accounts have drawn on grammaticalization theory, less commonly also on the… read more
This paper investigates the formal and functional properties of so-called semi-insubordination (SIS), i.e. complex sentences with an ‘incomplete’ matrix clause (e.g. Funny that you should say that), on the basis of corpus data. It is shown that SIS differs in its function from the structurally… read more
Exclamative expressions like What an enormous crowd came! and How wonderful this journey is! have been described as forming one of the four basic sentence (or clause) types of English. The present paper discusses the main features of this type and analyzes them with reference to the framework of… read more
This chapter proposes a dualistic classification of formulaic sequences based on the assumptions of Discourse Grammar, which distinguishes two components of language organisation and processing, viz. Sentence grammar and Thetical grammar. Accordingly, we can distinguish between Sentence grammar… read more
The chapter is concerned more generally with what, following Evans (2007), we call insubordinated (or insubordinate) clauses, that is, with the conventionalized main clause use of what, prima facie, appear to be formally subordinate clauses. Insubordinated clauses are, as we argue here, information… read more
Insubordinate clauses are a problem for grammatical analysis as they are subordinate in terms of their form but used like independent main clauses. This chapter investigates the grammatical status of insubordinate if-clauses in English on the basis of spoken data from the British Component of the… read more
The goals of the present chapter are twofold. On the one hand, it aims to show the potential that studies on grammaticalization offer for reconstructing earlier phases in the evolution of language or languages, that is, phases that are not within the scope of the classical methods of historical… read more
The syntactic status of clause-initial complement-taking predicates has been controversially discussed in the literature with analyses ranging from main clause to parenthetical. This chapter sheds light on the question by providing a usage-based account of 200 occurrences of initial I think in a… read more
Most frameworks of linguistic analysis tend to highlight phenomena of language use and/or language knowledge such as sentence and word structure, while backgrounding or ignoring other phenomena that are interpreted as being of more marginal interest for the linguist. The main goal of this paper is… read more
This article investigates English parenthetical clauses, a category which subsumes a wide range of forms and generally lacks a clear definition in the literature. The aim of the study is to systematise the class of parenthetical clauses with a view to highlighting its internal stratification and… read more
This paper investigates the communicative use ofit-extraposition (e.g.It is surprising that John went to London) in texts, based on a corpus analysis of 1,701 instances in the British component of theInternational Corpus of English. Contrary to the wayit-extraposition is often treated in the… read more