ABSTRACT
There are many ways of carving up and describing English. In this chapter, both authors start by providing a brief overview of the different linguistic levels that typify the way many linguists have traditionally approached English structure. Then Caroline Coffin takes a historical perspective and, focusing on grammar in particular, reflects on why particular views on language structure came to dominate at different historical points. The chapter then goes on to discuss some exciting contemporary perspectives and methods of examination. Kieran O’Halloran looks at corpus linguistics. A corpus is a large electronic database of texts, e.g. The Bank of English is a corpus of 450 million words; The British National Corpus consists of 100 million words. In the past 10 to 20 years, technology has developed to allow quick searches of corpora. Instead of relying on their intuitions of how language is used, or on small amounts of data, linguists can now make empirically robust statements about widespread language use. Indeed, corpus-based linguistics is challenging traditional ways of describing and classifying language structure. Coffin also considers the impact of systemic functional linguistics, a theory which puts in central position the relationship between grammatical structure and the texts and social contexts in which language is used. She indicates how such an orientation departs from traditional ways of describing English. Finally, O’Halloran takes stock and considers some of the strengths and weaknesses of these approaches to describing English.
