Hans Basbøll

Carl Bache

Carl-Erik Lindberg

The series is a platform for contributions of all kinds to this rapidly developing field. General problems are studied from the perspective of individual languages, language families, language groups, or language samples. Conclusions are the result of a deepened study of empirical data. Special emphasis is given to little-known languages, whose analysis may shed new light on long-standing problems in general linguistics.

Empirical and Theoretical Contributions to Language Typology

Tense, Aspect and Action

Essentials of Mastering English: A Concise Grammar is both an ideal companion for undergraduate students wishing to acquire a high level of grammatical proficiency and a readily accessible reference work for teachers of English at all levels. It provides an introduction to basic grammatical terms and to elementary syntactic description, enabling students to analyse sentences and utterances down to word level with a specification of both the form and the function of all constituents.

A Concise Grammar

Essentials of Mastering English

This book is aimed at fellow practitioners and researchers in functional linguistics. It offers a friendly but critical appraisal of a major component of the 'standard' version of SFL, i.e. the account given by Halliday and Matthiessen of tense and aspect in English. Supporting his criticisms with evidence from a project in corpus linguistics, Bache suggests that this account fails in several ways to satisfy accepted functionalist criteria, and hence needs revising and extending. After surveying alternative functionalist approaches to modelling time and tense in English (including Fawcett's Cardiff school approach and Harder's instructional-semantic approach), and after presenting a number of principles of category description, Bache goes on to offer an alternative SFL account of this area of grammar. In Bache's model, the focus is on the speaker's communicative motivation for choosing particular verb forms. The relevant choice relations are seen to draw on metafunctionally diverse resources, such as tense, action, aspect and other domains. The basically univariate, serial structure of the verbal group is accordingly enriched with certain characteristics associated with multivariate structures, and the idea of recursion is abandoned. Finally, Bache examines the descriptive potential of his model in connection with projection, conditions, and narration.

A Critical Appraisal and an Alternative

English Tense and Aspect in Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar

Tense, Aspect, and Action

Niels Davidsen-Nielsen

The future of English linguistics as envisaged by the editors of Topics in English Linguistics lies in empirical studies which integrate work in English linguistics into general and theoretical linguistics on the one hand, and comparative linguistics on the other. The TiEL series features volumes that present interesting new data and analyses, and above all fresh approaches that contribute to the overall aim of the series, which is to further outstanding research in English linguistics.

Carl Bache

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