Irregularities of Sentence Structure in Contemporary Colloquial English

Místo vydání:

Rok vydání:

Strany: 
42-48
ISBN/ISSN: 

Jazyk:

Kontakt: 
marketa.mala@ff.cuni.cz
Abstrakt: 

The paper attempts to describe and classify the irregular sentences characteristic of present-day colloquial English . Only those structures satisfying the following criteria of sentence status have been considered: the criterion of complete intonation contour (reflected in punctuation in written texts) has been adopted for distinguishing the sentence with respect to higher units. The criterion of identifiability of the predicative function in the sentence is used to differentiate it from lower units, from denomination. Both parcels, e.g. He wants me to go down to see him. In London. To fix things up., and sentence fragments, aposiopeses, such as e.g. Where is my, are you reading my pamphlet?, were excluded from the description on the basis of the above criteria.
The syntactic structure of colloquial English comprises two large groups of sentences: first, syntactically regular sentences identical with those found in the neutral sphere of the language, and "regularly incomplete" sentences - i.e. elliptical structures derived from the regular sentences. The second group consists of irregular sentences occurring only in the domain of colloquial English. According to Bowman the irregular sentences constitute about 25 to 35% of the informal dialogue (cf. Bowman, 1966).

Bibliografie: 

Bauer, J. and M. Grepl (1980) Skladba spisovné češtiny. Praha, SPN
Bowman, E. (1966) The minor and fragmentary sentences of a corpus of spoken English.
The Hague, Mouton & Co.
Daneš, F. (1987) “Cognition and emotion in discourse interaction: a preliminary survey of the field.” Preprints of the Plenary Session Papers, XlVth International Congress of Linguists. Berlin 10.-15. August 1987, 272 - 291.
Dušková, L. a kol. (1988) Mluvnice současné angličtiny na pozadí češtiny. Praha,
Academia.
Dušková, L. (1991) “An Attempt at a Classification of Irregular Sentences and Nonsentences.” Acta Universitatis Carolinae 1, Prague Studies in English 19, 71-81. Halliday, M. A. K. and R. Hasan (1976) Cohesion in English. London, Longman
Malá, M. (2000) "Irregular Sentences in Colloquial English", Acta Universitatis Carolinae, Philologica 5, 1997. Prague Studies in English 22, 79 - 90.
Mathesius, V. (1911) “Poznámky o tzv. ellipse a anglických větách neslovesných.” Praha, Sborník filologický, roč. II., část II., 215 - 234.
Mathesius, V. (1975) A Functional Analysis of Present Day English on a General Linguistic Basis. Praha, Academia.
Mluvnice češtiny, 3 - Skladba (1987). Praha, Academia.
Nekvapil, J. (1993) “On the Asymmetry between Syntactic and Elementary Textual Units”, in Studies in Functional Stylistics, eds J. Chloupek and J. Nekvapil, Academia, 186 — 222.
Nosek, J. (1969) “Pause and Repetition in Modem Colloquial English”, Acta Universitatis Carolinae - Philologica 3, Prague Studies in English 13, 35 - 58.
Nosek, J. (1971) “Truncated Utterances in Modem Colloquial English”, Acta Universitatis Carolinae - Philologica 5, Prague Studies in English 14, 89 - 108
Pepmík, J. (1950) “Nominální věty v moderní anglické próze.” Časopis pro moderní filologii, roč. 34, č.l, 40 - 41.
Quirk, R. and S. Greenbaum, G. Leech, J. Svartvik (1985) A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London, Longman.
Skrebnev, Ju. M. (1985) Vvedenije v kollokvialistiku. Saratovsk, IzdatePstvo Saratovskogo universiteta.