Relative Clauses Structure and Variation in Everyday English

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.

Prologue; 1. Background; 2. Resumptive relatives; 3. Prepositional relatives; 4. Gapless relatives; Epilogue.

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).