We examine the syntactic structures exhibited by persons with dementia in conversation. Traditionally, research on the linguistic abilities of persons with dementia is either observational (reports kept by caregivers) or experimental (e.g. based on comprehension tasks), and the focus is not on the syntactic competence of the speaker. We combine…

Reports on an analysis of the forms, strategies, and functions of complimenting in one genre of written discourse. It is argued that writers use complimenting discourse strategies to establish and maintain rapport and to mitigate both global and genre-specific face-threatening acts and that these social purposes help account for both their…

Describes a project to code complementation patterns of all verbs in the Collins COBUILD English language corpus, using simple notation based on words and word classes rather than traditional functional categories. This is the first pedagogic grammar to integrate syntax and lexis using corpus data. Explores the possibility of using a pattern…

Analyzes the use of language in two British and Australian secondary school textbooks and a corpus of written British English of one million words. Significant differences were found in the distribution of syntactic patterns in the two books, and these differences are discussed as evidence of the ideological stances expressed in the books.…