These tell us what choices are available in the grammar, but we also need to understand how these choices are used to create discourse in different situations. This was the outcome of an international research project which fasted seven years. Now, we have written a revised, simplified, and shortened version of LGSWE for use by advanced students and their teachers.
LGSWE made important innovations in the method of grammatical study. It was based on a large, balanced corpus of spoken and written texts. These texts were electronically stored and analyzed with the aid of computers.
The analysis produced information about the frequency of grammatical features in different kinds of language. The results of the analysis were then.
The goal was to explain not just what is possible in English grammar, but what is more or less probable in different situations. SGSWE is designed to be used with the accompanying workbook as a textbook for use in class or for self-study , or alternatively as a reference grammar: « SGSWE is a pedagogical textbook on grammar. It ends with a chapter devoted to the special characteristics of conversational grammar—an important topic which has generally been neglected in grammars up to now.
It covers all major features, structures, and classes of English grammar, together with their meaning and use. With the help of the glossary of grammatical terms and the index, students and teachers can use this book as a reference guide.
For more detailed information about a feature or its use, you ean consult corresponding sections in the larger LGSWE. The new methodology of large-scale corpus study developed in LGSWE produces results which are very useful for students. In general, advanced students of English want to understand not only the structural rules of English, but how the language is used for communication.
For this purpose, new insights, explanations, and information from corpus-based studies of English are an important advantage. These are authentic examples from the corpus, showing how real people use real language. Invented examples that sound artificial—a familiar feature of many other grammars—are entirely absent. At the same time, we have taken care to avoid corpus examples that arc overly difficult because they require understanding a complicated context. In the past, grammars have usually presented a single view of the language, as if the grammar of English were one fixed and unchanging system.
This clearly is not true. Although there is an underlying system of grammar, speakers and writers exploit that system very differently to mcet their communication needs in different circumstances. The corpus-based information included in SGSWE describes differences between a spoken register conversation and three written registers fiction, newspapers, and academic prose. In addition, our corpus contains data from both American and British conversations and newspapers.
Where they occur, important differences between these geographical dialects are pointed out, See 1. Specifically, we discuss the frequency of alternative structures and the conditions that are associated with them.
This is clearly a major matter of interest to advanced learners of the language and future teachers of the language. For example, it is not enough simply to describe the structural differences between active and passive constructions, because students and teachers need to know how users choose between these two options. For example, passive verbs are ten times more frequent in academic prose than they are in conversation.
And there are good reasons for this, which we discuss in 6. Usually several factors are rclevant, including register, expressing personal attitudes, giving informational emphasis, or other more specific contextual conditions.
The SGSWE gives attention to the conditions under which grammatical choices are made, so the grammar has a discourse orientation. Traditionally, both in theory and pedagogical practice, grammar has been separate from.
This separation is artificial, as becomes evident ta anyone who uses a large corpus for studying grammar. What becomes clear is that, when they use a language, people bring together their knowledge of word behavior lexis with their knowledge of grammatical patterns, These two aspects of language interact in lexico-grammatical patterns.
For example, there is one set of verbs that commonly occur with a that-clause e. In addition, each register prefers different verbs with these clause types.
These patterns help to explain the typical meanings and uses of cach clause type in cach register, 1. It is important to recognize that there are two major types of language varieties: registers and dialects. For example, Table 1. Comparisons between registers can be made on many different levels. For example, the most general distinction can be made on the basis of mode: conversation is spoken, while the other three registers are written.
If we consider a more specific characteristic—the main communicative purpose—the registers fall into three categories. We sometimes call these last two expository registers. However, even between newspapers and academic prose there are differences, Academic prose is more concerned with building an argument than newspaper writing is. What is more, academic prose has a more specialized audience than a newspaper, which is written with a wide audience in mind.
Register variation is the main aspect of language variation we consider in this book. We choose this focus because registers differ greatly in their grammar usage, reflecting their different communication circumstances. In other words, the circumstances of a register have a direct impact on which grammar habits are common in the register.
To take an easy example, consider how pronouns and nouns are used in conversation and news. Conversation is interactive as a form of personal communication. It is not surprising, then, that conversation shows a frequent use of the first-person pronouns I and we, and the second-person pronoun you. In contrast, newspaper writing is not directly interactive: it is not addressed to an individual reader, and it often does not have a stated author.
But it has a function of conveying general information of current interest. Not surprisingly, in newspaper texts, first- and second-person pronouns are relatively rare.
Instead, proper nouns, referring to people, places, and institutions, are particularly common. However, they have the advantage of a being major registers, likely to be frequently encountered by any advanced student of the language, and b being sufficiently different from one another to show important differences as well as important similarities. Within each register there are also sub-registers. For example, fiction can be broken down into different sub-categories—detective fiction, fantasy fiction, romance fiction, etc.
The compilers of the LSWE Corpus took pains to represent all the categories and to obtain as good a balance as possible between different sub-varieties within each category. More details are given in 1. In order to limit the size of this book, though, we make only a few references to sub- registers, such as commenting on a feature common in, say, sports reporting or detective fiction. Dialects are varicties according to the identity of speaker s or writer s —their geographic area, gender, socio- economic class, and so on.
Dialect is less important for grammatical purposes than register. From the grammatical point of view, dialect differences are arbitrary, while register differences are functional, reflecting the way that grantmar varies according to communicative purpose.
Like register, dialect distinctions can be made at different levels of specificity. In the SGSWE we focus only on the high-level distinction between American English and British English although the spoken corpus was developed following sampling methods for geographical regions, socio-economic class, gender, and age, so more detailed dialect studies are possible.
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