1 Preliminaries

Abstract

1 The aim of this book 2 2 Prescriptivism, tradition, and the justification of grammars 5 2.1 Prescriptive and descriptive approaches: goals and coverage 5 2.2 Disagreement between descriptivist and prescriptivist work 6 3 Speech and writing 11 3 .1 The representation of English pronunciation 13 3 .1.1 Rhotic and non-rhotic accents 13 3 .1.2 An accent-neutral phonological representation 14 3 .2 Pronunciation and spelling 17 4 Theoretical framework 18 4.1 Description and theory 18 4.2 Basic concepts in syntax 20 4.2.1 Constituent structure 20 4.2.2 Syntactic categories 21 4.2.3 Grammatical constructions and functions 23 4.3 Morphology, inflectional and lexical 26 4.4 Defining grammatical concepts 28 5 Semantics, pragmatics, and meaning relations 33 5 .1 Truth conditions and entailment 34 5 .2 Non-truth-conditional aspects of sentence meaning 36 5 .3 Pragmatics and conversational implicatures 37 5 .4 Pragmatic presupposition 40