The goal of this chapter is to guide the reader interested in grammar in interaction through the entire research process, beginning with how to find a researchable phenomenon and culminating in how to reveal the larger significance of research findings on grammar. We focus primarily on grammatical phenomena that are morphosyntactic in nature but include discussion of how prosodic-phonetic and embodied practices can impact the exploration of morphosyntactic phenomena. We begin by addressing some of the multiple sources of inspiration for a new research project on grammar, including starting with an observation in the data, or with an observation from the linguistic literature, or with an observation from the CA/IL literature on a different language. We then explore how to delimit the phenomenon chosen and how to build a collection of pertinent instances. Finally, we turn to issues of analyzing the collection and constructing an argument, with a final discussion of how to probe the theoretical significance of grammatical findings. In conclusion, we note that because of its orderliness, grammar in general as well as language-specific grammatical practices contribute to establishing and maintaining the social order.

Mersea Island is a small island off the coast of north-east Essex, UK, which has a rich history of contact, ranging from Viking and Roman settlements to more modern influxes of evacuees and military personnel during both World Wars. The island itself also has a history of isolation, due to its only access road being cut off regularly by lunar tides. However, this isolation has been challenged over more recent years by various building projects, resulting in a large influx of non-islanders moving and settling on the island. This overview will present a range of phonological features across both the consonantal and vocalic systems of Mersea Island English as evidence from both older and younger Islanders to highlight traditional features and the direction of change within the community as a whole. A selection of morphosyntactic features which highlight more salient structures of Mersea Island English is then presented before a discussion of how we may wish to evaluate paths of change moving forward in relation to both socio-cultural and linguistic factors.

This chapter presents on overview of present-day Welsh English(es) with a focus on regional variation and diachronic developments over the past fifty years. The Anglicisation of Wales has progressed in several phases over the centuries, which is why the accents and dialects of English in Wales are regionally distinctive, the Welsh language and neighbouring English English dialects impacting them to different degrees. The chapter takes the Survey of Anglo-Welsh dialects (Parry 1999) as a starting point and uses corpus and survey data compiled in the twenty-first century as well as recent research publications, thereby examining the main trends of development in the different domains of English. Phonological variation and change are described across a broad North–South continuum, whereas in morphosyntax the greatest differences can be found between the predominantly English-speaking Southeast and the bilingual, historically Welsh-dominant North and West Wales. In regional lexicon, sociolinguistically and nationally salient items are relatively few, originating from both Welsh and English. Finally, the chapter draws attention to recent research, and highlights some caveats and future directions for the study of English in Wales.

In this chapter we examine a number of present-day varieties of Scots and Scottish Standard English (SSE). We begin by describing the Scots–SSE continuum, with its roots in earlier socio-cultural developments. We then turn to the present day, examining the attitudes towards different varieties of Scots across geographic and social dimensions. The main part of the chapter focuses on recent research on the many varieties of Scots, providing a detailed picture of the phonological and morphosyntactic forms found therein. In terms of phonology, Scots and SSE overlap, but remain divergent, especially given a number of phonological changes in Scots over the twentieth century, and continued Scots regional variation. The analysis of morphosyntax shows a core of forms shared across most varieties, including SSE, and these are largely stable. A number of other ‘home-grown’ forms are increasing in use across Scotland. Overall, our analysis shows that Scots is maintaining its own distinctive pathway in the twenty-first century.

This chapter discusses different ways that grammar has been viewed, and answers questions such as: Is there always just one grammatical form that’s correct? and How do linguists and lay people think about grammar? The chapter reviews different ways of understanding and investigating grammar learning such as pedagogical grammar, systemic functional linguistics, contrastive analysis, CALF (complexity, accuracy, lexical complexity, and fluency), language-related episodes, and languaging. The chapter then explores several issues that are specific to grammar learning, such as rule-learning and developmental stages. In particular, it discusses processability theory, teachability theory, and communicative competence. The chapter continues by examining possible answers to the question What’s the best way to teach grammar? The chapter includes the traditional, explicit approach to grammar instruction, and continues with other approaches that are more communicative. Different approaches include proactive and reactive grammar teaching, isolated and integrated form-focused instruction, focused and unfocused tasks, and concept-based instruction.

The chapter presents a broad overview of current research on the formal properties of Slavic languages developing in heritage language settings. Representative studies on heritage Russian, Polish, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Serbian, and Croatian are synthesized along the following grammatical dimensions. In the nominal and verbal domains, I review properties of the heritage Slavic case and gender systems and the encoding of temporal distinctions through aspect and tense morphology. At the levels of sentence organization and discourse structure, I survey word order change pertaining to the syntax of clitics and the placement of clausal constituents to convey information-structural distinctions. The concluding discussion identifies the key overarching principles underlying the changes attested across the surveyed linguistic varieties and outlines directions for future studies in heritage Slavic linguistics.

This work compares the morphosyntactic properties of expressive suffixes in four European languages: Russian, German, Spanish and Greek. It shows that although these suffixes share the same expressive meaning, they differ significantly in their syntactic structure, namely in the manner and place of attachment in the syntactic tree. Thus, the Russian and Spanish expressive suffixes that refer to the size of a referent (or size suffixes) are syntactic modifiers, while the German size suffixes are syntactic heads. And in Greek, the two most productive expressive suffixes -ak and -ul have homophonous counterparts that possess contrasting syntactic properties: syntactic heads vs. syntactic modifiers. This shows that across languages as well as within single languages, such as Greek, there is no 1:1 correspondence between the meaning and the structure of expressive forms. These findings are further supported by two novel case studies of the homophonous suffixes -its (in Greek) and -ic (in Russian).

This chapter analyzes how languages are acquired in multilingual contexts and focuses on the development of phonological competence, morphosyntactic skills, and vocabulary. We discuss the differences and similarities that monolingual and bilingual children may show in language development, as well as possible advantages and disadvantages related to bilingualism. We explain that simultaneous exposure to two (or more) languages does not cause confusion or developmental delays, as is often feared by caregivers. We demonstrate that simultaneous bilinguals generally reach language milestones at the same age as monolinguals.

Chapter 9, the longest chapter, presents a step-by-step discussion of the OLG theory of syntax, focusing especially on issues of central concern to syntacticians: phrase structure, movement or filler-gap dependencies, and the architecture of grammar. A detailed walk-through of how to derive an English sentence is given, including formal definitions of syntactic features. Analyses of the range of typological variation observed in relevant word-order, case-marking and information-structural phenomena are presented from an OLG perspective, including detailed case studies of the Faroese clause structure facts presented in Chapter 2 and an in-depth treatment of object shift in Scandinavian languages. Ranking arguments, constraint definitions and factorial typologies are given where needed. Chapter 9 is intended to answer most of the major questions regarding how this theory handles a broader range of data.

The vast majority of children grow up in bilingual or multilingual households, but the extent to which they develop advanced linguistic abilities and even literacy in all their languages depends on many factors. These include age of acquisition of the two languages, the amount of exposure to and use of the languages daily and in specific or diverse contexts, and the status of the languages in the society, including access to schooling. For some simultaneous and sequential bilingual children, one or more of their languages is a minority language not widely spoken outside the home and with little cultural, educational, social and political status. In some other circumstances, the language or languages can be minoritized, available beyond the home but considered lower in status in the society. In this chapter, I discuss research on the development of the minority/heritage language(s) in simultaneous and sequential bilingual and multilingual children, with specific focus on the school-age period. I focus on how bilingual balance and language shift in these children and in many cases lead to language attrition and incomplete acquisition of morphosyntactic aspects of the minority language.