The Clause in English

Book excerpt: The focus in this volume is on grammatical aspects of the clause in English, presenting a fine balance between theoretically- and descriptively-oriented approaches. Some authors investigate the status and properties of 'minor' or 'fringe' constructions, including 'deictic-presentationals'; non-restrictive relative clauses with that; 'isolated if-clauses', and 'exceptional clauses'. In some articles the validity of conventional accounts and approaches is questioned: such as traditional constituency trees and labelled bracketings as a means of representing relationships between parenthetical elements and their 'hosts'; or traditional morphophonemic analyses as explanations for Ross's 'doubl-ing' constraint. While some authors question commonly made assumptions (for example those concerning the relationships of clauses to sentences and propositions; or those concerning the status of post-head dependents in the NP), others appeal to new frameworks (for instance 'emergence theory' is used as a source of inspiration in dealing with 'intransitive prepositions'). This collection also includes articles that adopt a solidly corpus-based approach. The Clause in English has been prepared by colleagues past and present, friends and admirers of Rodney Huddleston, in order to honour his consistently outstanding contribution to grammatical theory and description.