An Introduction to Applied Linguistics

Speaker 1: Got on better with Glynbob I think and John Bish let me and Trudie sleep in 
his bed last time we went up to Brunel or the one time when we stayed in Old Windsor 
with them cos erm Ben had given us his room cos he’d gone away for the weekend 
and erm it was me and Trudie just in Ben’s room and John Doughty had a double bed so 
he, John Bish had a double bed so he offered us this double bed between us and then slept 
in Ben’s room cos Ben and PQ had gone away for the weekend.
(Hughes and McCarthy, 1998: 270)
Hughes and McCarthy (1998) note that the italicized past perfects seem to give a 
reason or justification for the main events. In a similar vein, Celce-Murcia (1998) 
argues that the vast majority of grammatical choices that writers make represent 

---

24 An Introduction to Applied Linguistics
‘rules’ that are discourse-sensitive, including position of adverbials, passive versus 
active voice, indirect object and direct object, sequencing, pronominalization 
across independent clauses, article/determiner selection, use of existential there 
and tense–aspect–modality choice. The order of adverbial clauses viz-a-viz main 
clauses in sentences, for instance, is not simply random. Rather, it has been found 
that sentence-initial adverbial clauses serve an important discourse-organizing 
role by linking up information in the main clause with information in the 
previous discourse; sentence-final clauses, in contrast, generally only expand the 
local main clause (Thompson, 1985; DeCarrico, 2000). The following example, 
from DeCarrico (2000), illustrates this point. It is an excerpt from a description of 
the painter Winslow Homer.
Thoreau had called the seacoast a ‘wild rank place ... with no flattery in it.’ Homer, 
in his later years, consciously cultivated a briney persona that matched [the seacoast] 
roughness. When he was not communing with the roaring sea from his studio, on 
Prout’s Neck, Maine, he was off in the Adirondacks with his brother, Charles, angling 
for trout.
(DeCarrico, 2000: 194)
The first sentence establishes, as the discourse topic, the ruggedness of the seacoast 
and Homer’s deliberate cultivation of a rugged persona to match. DeCarrico 
(2000) notes that, given this context, the initial placement of the when adverbial 
clause not only functions within the sentence to indicate a time relation between 
the events within the two clauses themselves, but it also serves as a discourse link 
between the previously established topic, that of the wild seacoast and the pursuit 
of a briney persona, and the idea of being off in the Adirondacks angling for trout. 
If normal word order had been used, with the adverbial clause in final position, 
the linkage with the previous discourse would be much less clear, if not entirely 
lost.
Spoken and Written Grammar
Corpus studies also reveal important distinctions between spoken and written 
grammar. Comparisons of spoken and written corpora have raised some basic 
questions concerning descriptions of grammar, such as how different types of 
spoken language can be classified, how features of written and spoken grammar 
are differently distributed and what the status of the spoken language is, as an 
object of study within applied linguistics (McCarthy 1998).
Carter and McCarthy (1995) believe that the differences between spoken 
and written grammar are especially important for pedagogical grammars, since 
‘descriptions that rest on the written mode or on restricted genres and registers of 
spoken language are likely to omit many common features of everyday informal 
grammar and usage’ (Carter and McCarthy, 1995: 154). For instance, grammars 
these authors surveyed gave examples of the reporting verb in the simple past 
tense (X said that Y), and yet in their spoken corpus they found various examples 
of the reporting verb in past continuous (X was saying Y). While undoubtedly 
such observations are valid, Leech (2000) contends that the same grammatical 
repertoires operate in both speech and writing, although the structures used in 
each may occur with different frequencies. It should also be noted that there has 
often been a ‘written bias’ in linguistic descriptions (Linell, 2005).

---

25
Grammar
Limitations of Grammatical Descriptions
Previous sections have reviewed issues in describing grammar, issues that were 
mainly concerned with what to describe, how to describe it and how to account 
for differing approaches and their implications in terms of theory and pedagogy 
in applied linguistics. But however precise and thorough researchers may attempt 
to be in addressing these issues, there are certain limitations to descriptions of 
grammar given in isolation from all other parts of the language system.
The Interdependence of Grammar and Lexis
Regardless of the type of description or the approach taken, when we try to 
make general statements about grammar that neatly identify broad patterns, 
we are abstracting away from the overall system in ways that are somewhat 
artificial. One reason is that it is very difficult to isolate grammar and lexis into 
completely separate categories, because grammar does not exist on its own. It 
is interdependent with lexis and, in many cases, grammatical regularity and 
acceptability are conditioned by words.
A commonly cited example is the past morpheme -ed, which applies only where 
the verb happens to be ‘regular’, as in walked, traded, wondered. Irregular verbs, 
on the other hand, take various past forms, such as drank or ate. However, the 
choice of lexical item may restrict grammatical structures in other ways. The 
progressive aspect, for instance, is often used to indicate a temporary activity, 
but certain lexical items may act upon the grammar to constrain this sense of 
temporariness. We easily recognize that a sentence such as Mary is taking a nap 
indicates a temporary activity, whereas Mary is taking a class indicates an activity 
of extended duration.
Lexicogrammar: The Problem of Defining Boundaries
A more striking instance of the interdependence of lexis and grammar is that 
of prefabricated ‘chunks’ of language, in which the boundary between the two 
becomes even more blurred. Native speakers tend to use a great many expressions 
that are formulaic in nature (Pawley and Syder, 1983), fixed or semi-fixed 
expressions that act as single lexical units used as wholes. That is, they are not 
composed each time from scratch by the rules of syntax. As fixed units, they 
appear to be intermediary between lexical words and grammatical structures.
These prefabricated units are called by many names, perhaps most commonly 
‘formulaic sequences’ (Wray, 2002), and exhibit great variability. Nattinger and 
DeCarrico (1992) were among the first to highlight the importance of these 
sequences, focusing in particular on ‘lexical phrases’, which they describe as 
‘multi-word lexical phenomena that exist somewhere between the traditional 
poles of lexicon and syntax, conventionalized form/function composites that 
occur more frequently and have more idiomatically determined meaning than 
language that is put together each time’ (page 1). As form/function composites, 
lexical phrases differ from other formulaic language, such as idioms (kick the