Relative Clauses: Structure and Variation in Everyday English

Cambridge Studies in Linguistics

by Andrew Radford

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.

321 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 20, 2019

Reviews

[Andromeda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Andrew Radford has, in this invaluable book, or shall I quite correctly call it, "treatise" investigated the three types of non-canonical relative clause in colloquial English. He compared them with the canonical relatives in standard varieties and registers of English.

It is my opinion that no one has ever gone to the depth of the issue as the author has. He has presented a very convincing argument that some of the non-canonical clauses are not necessarily be unacceptable or ungrammatical, a view which, paradoxically, I have chosen to disagree with.

I, nonetheless, enjoyed reading "Relative Clauses". This shall be my reference book from now on.