Pleased to announce that my 2023 book, 'Grammar in ELT and ELT materials' will soon be available in paperback!

It should be out in mid January, and the publishers are offering a 30% discount (using code DELPAP30) until the end of February. Details here! www.multilingual-matters.com/page/detail/...

A feature, not a bug

Even predatory journal spam can contribute to one's imposter syndrome …. ("If any"??!! 🤬)

"Dear G. Burton,
Hope you are well.
We are contacting you because your expertise in areas related to linguistics (if any) makes you an ideal candidate to review the manuscript entitled …"

Listen below to hear co-author @grahburton.bsky.social talking about our @candlinmynard.bsky.social book The Big Beasts of English Grammar and grammar issues in general.
youtu.be/Zafx24UvFg8?...

Two great opportunities with JESLA/EUROSLA

Brilliant, well done!

The PEC24, a new reference #corpus of Italian, is now available via Search-it, a CQPweb-based platform
👇
lt.eurac.edu/cqpweb/

A paper where PEC24 is described (English)
👇
doi.org/10.54103/203...

A short introduction (Italian)
👇
open.substack.com/pub/inparole...

Lucky book to have found such a nice home!

For exactly the same reasons, I wonder how viable our current way of doing academic writing is in the medium to long term.

(Cartoon found online: I don't know who to credit it to, sorry.)

Happy to share my paper “A Different View of Phraseological Complexity: The Role of Density, Diversity and Distance” published on the Journal of the Europ. Second Language Association in the collection “Multiple views on #phraseology in second language acquisition”
euroslajournal.org/articles/10....

Thanks for that. I guess all orthography is arbitrary to a lesser or greater extent.

What I have never been sure about is why it is an 'e' that was stacked. As your phonetic transcriptions show, it never represented the presence of an [e]-like sound, but ae/oe/ue are used even today when umlaut isn't available or can't be used. So is the 'e' simply supposed to represent fronting?

I just checked but alas there is not a single incidence of 'arseload', let alone 'an arseload of' in the Spoken BNC2014

Haha yes, I know the feeling. I also should be doing other things … The singular/plural dimension is mysterious, e.g. we found 'people/things/money' are the 3 most frequent nouns after both a lot of and lots of, but then 'time' is 4th most frequent after a lot of but is not frequent after lots of. 🤷‍♂️

One of my favourite findings was the difference between 'a load of' and 'loads of', with the former being massively favoured when talking pejoratively, e.g., 'a load of b******s'. Book here: www.candlinandmynard.com/englishgramm...

@eltresearch.bsky.social and I looked at both 'a … of' and '[plural] of …' quantifiers in our new book based on an analysis of the Spoken BNC2014. Neither 'a ton of' or 'tons of' made it into our frequency-based tables, surprisingly given your analysis shows they are still used frequently in UK Eng

Video and slides available!

Book Launch, Q&A, and Giveaway TODAY.
Register to join us!

www.candlinandmynard.com/englishgramm...

@grahburton.bsky.social @eltresearch.bsky.social

Register for the Online Book Launch, Q&A, and Giveaway!
The Big Beasts of English Grammar: An Exploration of Form and Function in Conversations.
Mon. 24 Feb
UK: 10am, Italy: 11am, Japan: 7pm
Registration and details: bit.ly/3EFiGCd
#englishgrammar
@eltresearch.bsky.social @grahburton.bsky.social

Come on, 10am! More than enough time for several coffees get you in grammar mood/mode!

Looking forward to our book launch on 24th January!

Thank you to everyone who followed our online Q&A with the authors! @eltresearch.bsky.social @grahburton.bsky.social
The Big Beasts of English Grammar: An Exploration of Form and Function in Conversations
Download a free excerpt (preview file) from PayHip.
www.candlinandmynard.com/englishgramm...

The exception to this are non-defining clauses used to add a comment (e.g. We're going on holiday next month, which we're looking forward to) but these don't tend to get much attention in textbooks. #bigbeastsgrammar

Non-defining relative clauses are also rare in the Spoken BNC2014, and hard to identify anyway in speech (because of the lack of punctuation). That's not a reason not to teach them, because they are common in writing, but they're often unnaturally presented in spoken contexts. #bigbeastsgrammar