Chapter 8 of Discourse Syntax (Discourse Markers) deals with elements within discourse which do not belong to the core clause but are either placed at the sentence periphery or within it as insertions. The chapter shows that discourse markers mainly serve the needs of spoken, interactive discourse, and that they are placed in variable sentence positions and also occur as characteristic discourse marker sequences. Discussing the use of discourse markers in different text types, the chapter highlights that discourse markers have a bracketing and an interactive function in spoken discourse, but that there is also some text-linguistic variation, such as a use in scripted discourse or in online writing to mark a certain informality. The issue of syntactic variation is covered by a discussion of the positioning of the discourse marker then. The chapter also touches upon the development and use of “actually” as a discourse marker, the rise and grammaticalization of discourse markers as parentheticals, and their role in language proficiency.

Chapter 5 of Discourse Syntax (Special Endings) deals with two constructions that place sentence elements in the final, end-focus position. Discussing the extraposition of subject clauses (it-extraposition) and the cleft construction (it-clefting), the chapter shows that both constructions serve the distribution of given before new information in the sentence and the placement of complex material at the end of the sentence (Principle of End-Weight). It also shows that alternative constructions (non-extraposition) as well as discourse types and registers play a role in how these non-canonical constructions are used and that there are differences between speech and writing as well as other discourse types and modes. The chapter also discusses the presentation and visualization of quantitative corpus-linguistic evidence and presents strategies for dealing with absolute, normalized, and proportional frequencies gained from natural language corpora.

Chapter 6 of Discourse Syntax (Connectives) deals with connectives as one aspect of grammatical cohesion and the grammar of discourse. It introduces the various syntactic elements that function as discourse connectives (coordinators, connective adjuncts), contrasts the overt and the covert expression of additive conjunction, and then turns to other semantic and pragmatic types of discourse relations (causative, adversative, temporal). The discussion of the occurrence of sentence-initial “and” as it is used to connect sentences in texts focuses on spoken discourse and narration. Turning to the other semantic classes of conjunction, the chapter describes characteristic uses of connectives within the academic register. The chapter also explains how to deal with frequencies of occurrence gathered from large-size corpora, elaborating on the need for normalized rates of occurrence rather than absolute frequencies and on how to adjust individual frequencies for their density.

Chapter 7 of Discourse Syntax (Pronouns and Ellipsis) deals with pronouns and ellipsis as another area of grammatical cohesion and of the grammar of discourse. It introduces reference and coreference and the different classes of pronouns. The discussion is based on the distinction between endophoric and exophoric reference, co-referential ties and chains of reference as well as the interpretation of pronouns as expressing extended reference. The chapter also discusses principles of pronoun interpretation and the concept of givenness from a psycholinguistic viewpoint. Givenness is explained with reference to the concepts of accessibility and recoverability, which are also shown to be relevant as conditions of elliptical reference and, in particular, the use of subject ellipsis in discourse. The chapter presents corpus data about the use of pronouns and ellipsis in texts and corresponding patterns of text-linguistic variation, such as interactive and oral language use as well as usage in types of written language (literary and electronic discourse, informal writing).

Chapter 3 of Discourse Syntax (Non-Canonical Beginnings) introduces students to sentences with non-canonical beginnings, which we define as the non-canonical placement of a core element of the clause to the left of the subject. Students learn to differentiate between topicalization, left-dislocation, and sentence-initial adjuncts, as well as different types of inversion, including locative inversion, and are introduced to how these syntactic patterns are used to structure the discourse – establishing topics, packaging information, providing signposts – and under which discourse conditions they occur. Woven into these explanations are data from current research in the text-linguistic and variationist approach and attestations from freely available corpora.

Two methods are applied to detect differences between corpus (sub )registers, exemplified by the press editorials sections in the British, Canadian and Jamaican components of the International Corpus of English. By design, these methods are apt to target differences between varieties that are represented by putatively comparable corpus material, but it turns out that many of the observed differences can in fact be laid at the door of different sampling strategies applied by corpus compilers. In the example at hand, contrasts can be traced back to the division into institutional and personal editorials. This finding gives rise to a call for a higher granularity of sampling schemes, richer metadata (e.g. on the situational characteristics of the language samples included), and better documentation. As for the methods chosen, the author demonstrates that corpus-driven profiling based either on POS monograms or on higher-level multi-dimensional analysis performs reasonably well, with smaller differences in robustness and computational expense.

Chapter 2 discusses the questions ‘what is language’ and ‘what is a language’. We explore properties of standard national languages as compared to regional dialects, registers, and pidgin and creole varieties. This survey illustrates that language seen as an abstract ability underlies all forms of linguistic variation and that the same sorts of grammatical concepts underlie any variety while questions of prestige or standard usage are fundamentally social and cultural issues. The interaction of social, cultural and linguistic issues is discussed from the perspective of language education.