Syntactic Maxi-Accidents in Spontaneous Speech of Middle-Class Speakers of English

Abstract

Spontaneous spoken language is known to be rich in fragmented and nonintegrated chunks of speech. The latter are the result of syntactic “accidents”, which are indispensible elements of spontaneous talk. Caused by a variety of pragmatic factors, syntactic accidents differ in their formal, lexical, and distributional features. With these features in view, we single out three main varieties of syntactic accidents: 1. maxi-accidents, 2. mini-accidents and 3. micro-accidents, which collectively constitute one whole paradigm. Within the framework of the present article, the main focus of the analysis is on maxi-accidents in spontaneous talk of middle-class native speakers of English. Based on the empirical data, the analysis outlines the key functional properties of maxi-accidents, such as their frequency of occurrence, positional characteristics and pragmatic reasons that lie behind maxi-accidents.