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This work is a sociolinguistic study employing quantitative methods to explore age, gender, and social class differences in the use of a range of discourse features. It is based on a gender-balanced sample of middle-class and working-class adolescents and adults, recorded under the same conditions in Glasgow, Scotland. Unlike studies of phonetic or morphological variation, the study of discourse variation requires samples of talk in action with speakers interacting with one another. The speakers, who knew each other, were recorded talking in the presence of the tape-recorder for approximately half an hour without the investigator being present. The recordings were transcribed in their totality and the transcripts searched for the occurrence of features such as the use of pronouns, adverbs, you know, I mean, as well as grammatical features such as questions and passive voice. The frequencies of use of the variables by the different social groups (e.g., middle-class women, adolescent boys) were calibrated and the results compared. Differences between adults and adolescents provided the greatest number of statistically significant results, followed by differences between males and females. The smallest number of statistically significant differences were related to social class. Qualitative analysis, however, revealed important social class differences in discourse styles. The study shows the danger of generalizing about social class or gender on the basis of a limited sample of a few discourse features.

This book is a description of English as it is spoken in New Zealand. New Zealand English (NZE) is one of the youngest native-speaker varieties of English, and is the only variety of English where there is recorded evidence of its entire history. It shares some features with other Southern Hemisphere varieties of English such as Australian English and South African English, but is also clearly distinct from these. For the past two decades, extensive research has focused on the evolution and ongoing development of the variety. The book presents the results of this research in an accessible way. It includes: an account of the phonetic, phonological, morphosyntactic, lexical, and discourse features that are characteristic of the dialect; a discussion of the historical development of NZE; a description of the current social and regional variation within the variety; an indication of the areas where change is currently occurring; and sample texts and an annotated bibliography of relevant literature. There are also several associated audio files, which provide examples of many of the phenomena discussed, at http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/dialects/.

This book examines discourse‐related features and their relevance for syntactic theory. This study adopts a cartographic approach to syntactic structures, and has two principal aims: (i) to determine the syntax of the functional projections associated with these types of features and (ii) to account for the various types of fronting phenomena observed in the Romance languages. Based primarily on data from Sicilian and Sardinian, this book sets out to show that contrary to standard assumptions, Focus Fronting in Romance is not restricted to contrastive interpretations, but is also possible with non‐contrastive (‘informational’) Focus. The synthesis of existing analyses and new empirical data from other Romance languages show that non‐contrastive Focus Fronting is a fairly widespread property of Romance, involving quantifiers and quantified expressions (QP‐Fronting) as well as constituents expressing new and unexpected information (Mirative Fronting). Drawing on this empirical evidence, and with the support of further relevant syntactic, prosodic, and interpretive differences, it is claimed that Contrastive Focus and Informational Focus constitute separate categories related to independent features and encoded in distinct focus projections. It is further proposed that a direct parallelism holds between the two focus categories and the two types of wh‐expressions identified in the literature, i.e. D‐linked wh‐phrases and non‐D‐linked wh‐phrases. The analysis of the interplay between word order and of the extension of the focus in different types of sentences reveals novel evidence for the interaction between focus and illocutionary and clause‐type operators. The focus of the clause is also sensitive to overt operators such as wh‐phrases, quantifiers, and focalizing adverbs. The association of focus with both overt and covert operators is therefore a key factor for the interface between syntax and information structure.