n this study Michael Covington considers the origins and development of the theories of sentence structure formulated by the Modistae, a group of grammarians and logicians who flourished in Paris between about 1270 and 1310. Some of the concepts of the medieval theoretical framework, notably government and dependency, have survived to the present day, and Dr Covington introduces insights from modern grammatical theories where appropriate.

This books identifies the important differences between speaking and writing. Halliday leads the reader from the development of speech in infancy, through an account of writing systems, to a comparative treatment of spoken and written language, contrasting the prosodic features and grammatical intricacy of speech with the high lexical density and grammatical metaphor or writing.

My Grammar Handbook

This study deals with interactional processes in conversational discourse, and the way they may get 'syntacticized' into grammatical constructions. It investigates the link between discourse function and syntactic form, and the ways in which grammatical form is a reflection on communicative function, through examining the communicative functions of Left-Dislocation in English. The investigation is corpus-based, and focuses on spontaneous conversation, but other discourse types are also taken into account. The overall perspective is resolutely empirical, and preconceptions about the possible functions of Left-Dislocation are avoided.

This book offers new work by some major figures in the field of linguistics, addressing old debates from the perspective of current explanatory grammatical theory. These include paradigmatic relations among words, and agreeing adjectives and their grammatical source. Covering a broad range of empirical domains, the contributors of this volume examine the role of Economy in syntax and in syntactic interfaces with phonology and semantics, and their implications for processing.