This textbook provides a concise, clear, and accessible introduction to current syntactic theory, drawing on the key concepts of Chomsky's Minimalist Program. Assuming little or no prior grammatical knowledge, Andrew Radford takes students through a wide range of topics in English syntax, beginning at an elementary level and progressing in stages towards more advanced material. There is an extensive glossary of technical terms, and each chapter contains a workbook section with 'helpful hints', exercises and model answers, suitable for both class discussion and self-study. This is an abridged version of Radford's major new textbook Minimalist Syntax (also published by Cambridge University Press), and will be welcomed as a short introduction to current syntactic theory.

This volumes examines selected formal and functional characteristics of English in South Asia, where English was introduced in the sixteenth century and now has over fifty million users. An integrative and interdisciplinary collection, the books brings together invited papers by acclaimed creative writers from India and Pakistan and by international linguists and English educators. The five major facets of South Asian English discussed are context and uses: structure and contact; functions and innovations; the curriculum; and the multilingual's creativity. The volume provides current perspectives on complex issues of concern to teachers and students of world Englishes.

This book offers an in-depth analysis of several features of spoken Indian English that are generally considered as 'typical', but have never before been studied empirically. Drawing on authentic spoken data from the International Corpus of English, Indian component, the book focuses on the domain of discourse organization and examines the form, function and distribution of invariant tags such as isn't it and no/na, non-initial existential there, focus markers only and itself, topicalization and left-dislocation. By focusing on multilingual speakers' interactions, the study demonstrates conclusively that spoken Indian English bears all the hallmarks of a vibrant contact language, testifying to a pan-South Asian 'grammar of culture' which becomes apparent in contact-induced language change in spoken Indian English. The book will be highly relevant for anyone interested in postcolonial varieties of English, contact linguistics, standardization, and discourse-pragmatic sentence structure.

Explores the similarities and differences of about forty South Asian languages from the four different language families.

A groundbreaking new textbook on English sentence structure for beginning students in colleges and universities.

The researchers in the field of theoretical and theoretically inclined descriptive linguistics have for a long time felt a need for detailed and clearly presented linguistic treatments of various syntactic phenomena in South Asian languages. Clause Structure in South Asian Languages: provides a comprehensive overview and covers major aspects of clause structure in a variety of South Asian languages; provides detailed analyses of several aspects of phrase structure of many prominent South Asian languages; gives theoretically up-to-date treatment of several important issues in South Asian syntax and semantics; contains papers by some of the most prominent linguists working on South Asian languages.

The present collection offers fresh perspectives on the lexicon-syntax interface, drawing on novel data from South Asian languages like Bangla, Hindi-Urdu, Kashmiri, Kannada, Malayalam, Manipuri, Punjabi, and Telugu. It covers different phenomena like adjectives, nominal phrases, ditransitives, light verbs, middles, passives, causatives, agreement, and pronominal clitics, while trying to settle the theoretical tensions underlying the interaction of the lexicon with the narrow syntactic component. All the chapters critically survey previous analyses in detail, suggesting how these may or may not be extended to South Asian languages. Novel explanations are proposed, which handle not only the novel data presented here, but also pave alternative ways to look at issues of minimalist architecture.