English sentence prosody provides cues to both focus structure and speaker attitude. Taking the phonological model of intonation developed by Pierrehumbert (1880 et seq.) as point of departure, this work illuminates the communicative function of English pitch contours by (1) giving a detailed survey of phrase-final contours found in statements and questions, and (2) investigating what attitudinal features determine choice of phrasal tones in these utterance types. This comprehensive study will be of interest to linguists in a number of fields, ranging from prosody to semantics, pragmatics, and discourse analysis.
The English it-cleft is noted for its non-standard structure and for its unusual pragmatic and discourse-functional properties. This book presents a constructional account of the English it-cleft which is based on evidence from three main areas: (a) the concept of specificational meaning, (b) the existence of predicational (and proverbial) it-clefts, and (c) the early, historical it-cleft data. Featuring a sizeable diachronic component, the book contributes to the limited (and largely unchallenged) literature on the history of the English it-cleft.
Taking both an empirical and a theoretical view of the prosodic phrasing of parentheticals in English, this book reviews the syntactic and prosodic literature on parentheticals along with relevant theoretical work at the syntax-prosody interface. It offers a detailed prosodic analysis of six types of parentheticals - full parenthetical clauses, non-restrictive relative clauses, nominal appositions, comment clauses, reporting verbs, and question tags, all taken from the spoken part of the British Component of the International Corpus of English.
This book explores the English verb-particle construction from a historical and cross-linguistic perspective. Challenging established views and tracing their origins in the normative tradition, the author shows the evolution of theconstruction to follow a widely attested path and argues that the apparentpeculiarities of phrasal verbs in Modern English are epiphenomenal to otherstructural characteristics of the language.
English is a glorious mess of a language, cobbled together from a wide variety of sources and syntaxes, and changing over time with popular usage. Many of the words and usages we embrace as standard and correct today were at first considered slang, impolite, or just plain wrong.
