Epilogue

Summary

This book marks the culmination of a decade-long adventure for me, in which I have been able to combine a passion for (armchair) sport with a passion for analysing language, through a detailed study of a range of non-canonical structures found in live, unscripted radio and TV broadcasts (supplemented by data from other sources). I hope that the book has achieved the following aims:

• dispelling the prescriptive myth that colloquial English utilises substandard structures characterised by a sloppy form of language which has no proper structure and is thus not worthy of the attention of serious scholars

• showing how supposedly ‘sloppy’ structures in which (e.g.) topics and relative pronouns are seemingly unlinked to their associated propositions actually involve a form of pragmatic linking which is found in other languages (e.g. Chinese, Japanese and Thai)

• highlighting the richness of non-standard English, illustrating this in terms of a vast panoply of novel authentic data sourced mainly from live, unscripted radio and TV broadcasts or the web

• adding to awareness of the range and nature of non-standard, nondialectal variation in colloquial English, and contributing novel data to debates about language typology and microvariation

• showing that the range of syntactic structures found in colloquial English can profitably be studied and understood from a formal syntactic perspective

• contributing to understanding the cartography of the clause periphery, employing (what in terms of cartographic work is) a novel source of data from authentic examples of spoken English

• showing that the clause periphery is the locus of much variation in syntax, with parametric variation reducible to the feature composition and spellout of functional heads

• showing how a usage-based approach to linguistic analysis can provide a fertile additional source of data which complements other (e.g. introspective and experimental) approaches

I hope that you have had as much fun in reading the book as I had in collecting and analysing the data!

What's next for me?Well, I have a lot of data on relative clauses in colloquial English, so my next goal is to prepare a monograph on these, if my biological clock carries on ticking long enough!