Introduction A discourse perspective on grammar

1. IntroductionA discourse perspective on grammar Longman Student Grammar of Spoken and Written English Biber; Conrad; Leech (2009, p.1-11)

2. Introduction to the concept of corpus-based grammar • Systematic patterns of choice in the use of English grammar. • Language for the purposes of communication: real use of language; choices used to create discourse in different situations. • Grammar based on a large, balanced corpus (collection stored on computer) of spoken and written text: • Real examples • Coverage of language variation • Interpretation of frequency: context and discourse • Lexico-grammatical patterns

3. Language variation • Register • Mode: written versus spoken • Main communicative purpose: personal communication; pleasure reading or information purpose • Dialects • According to the identity of the speaker/writer: geographic area, gender, socioeconomic class... • Standard and Vernacular English • Variation in standard English • Prescriptive v. descriptive grammars

4. Standard and non-standard English • Standard English is not a single, uniform variety, and it is not always obvious whether a form should be considered standard or not. Standard English can be defined descriptively as follows: in writing, standard forms are used generally across published sources; in speech, standard forms are shared widely across dialects. Thus, any form that is restricted to a single dialect would be considered non-standard. In contrast, many forms are used widely in conversation but are inappropriate in formal written texts; we would call these ‘standard’ spoken forms.

5. A: My brother is never gonna move out of my parent’s house. B: How old is he? A: Twenty-five. B: Oh, if you’re not moved out by twenty-five, you know, I don’t know. A: He would die if he moved out of my father’s house so, he would. B: See I would die if I lived at my house. A: So would I. C: Me too. Let’s analyse the underlined structures There was a couple of policemen down there...

6. The Longman Spoken and Written English Corpus • Overal composition of the LSWE Corpus • Approximate numbers of speakers in the BrE and AmE conversation supcorpora by gender • Distribution of fiction texts across national varieties • Breakdown of the British and American new subcorpora by topic • Breakdown of the academic prose subcorpus

7. Overview of the book • Chapters 2-3: Key concepts and categories in English grammar • Chapters 4-7: A close look at the major phrase types • Chapter 8: Clause grammar • Chapter 9-12: Building on the clause • Chapter 13: The grammar of conversation

8. Quiz: Identify each of the following statements as either true or false. • The SGSWE describes the grammatical preferences of speakers and writers, so it includes information about the frequency of grammatical choices. • A descriptive grammar presents rules about correct and incorrect stylistic choices. • A prescriptive grammar describes the grammatical patterns that speakers and writers follow when they use the language, regardless of whether the patterns conform to standard English that is presented in usage handbooks. • A corpus is a collection of written texts that is on a computer. • One of the advantages of a corpus-based grammar, such as SGSWE, is that it can describe how speakers and writers vary their grammatical choices for different communicative purposes.

9. Quiz: Identify each of the following statements as either true or false. • Another advantage of a corpus-based grammar is that it can reveal associations between grammatical structures and vocabulary (i.e. lexico-grammatical patterns). • A register is a variety of language that is associated with speakers who share certain characteristics, such as gender, socio-economic class, or geographic region. • A dialect is a variety of language that is associated with certain characteristics of a communicative setting, such as the purpose of communication, the amount of time for planning, and the mode (e.g. spoken v. written). • Different registers often have different frequencies for the use of certain grammatical structures. • ‘Standard English’ is one unvarying form of English that is always easy to identify. • There is a group of experts that officially decides whether or not a grammatical form is ‘standard English’.