37.557, Reviews: Non-Canonical English Syntax: Sven Leuckert and Teresa Pham (ed.) (2025)

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Subject: 37.557, Reviews: Non-Canonical English Syntax: Sven Leuckert and Teresa Pham (ed.) (2025)

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Date: 10-Feb-2026
From: Geoffrey Sampson [sampson at cantab.net]
Subject: Sven Leuckert and Teresa Pham (ed.) (2025)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/36-2489

Title: Non-Canonical English Syntax
Subtitle: Concepts, Methods, and Approaches
Series Title: Studies in English Language
Publication Year: 2025

Publisher: Cambridge University Press
           http://www.cambridge.org/linguistics
Book URL:
https://www.cambridge.org/universitypress/subjects/languages-linguistics/grammar-and-syntax/non-canonical-english-syntax-concepts-methods-and-approaches?format=HB&isbn=9781108836128

Editor(s): Sven Leuckert and Teresa Pham

Reviewer: Geoffrey Sampson

SUMMARY
This book has emerged from an academic network “Syntax Beyond the
Canon”, sponsored by the German Research Foundation between 2019 and
2025.  The contributors share the idea that, for anything one might
want to say, there is a default – “canonical” – way of saying it, and
they are interested in how, and why, a language-user might instead
choose an alternative, “non-canonical” way of expressing himself
(where the alternatives considered relate largely to word-order
differences).  Thus the co-editors begin their introductory chapter by
writing that “the sentence ‘I met Sigrid’ exemplifies the default
composition and ordering of clause elements …  Yet, if we study actual
language use, we find frequent deviations from this default:  ‘Sigrid
I met’; ‘It was Sigrid that I met’; ‘Sigrid, I met her’; or even ‘Met
Sigrid’.”
There are fifteen chapters.  Chapter 1 is the Introduction from which
the above quotation is taken, and Chapter 2 is a study of the use of
the term “canonical” and related terms in the literature of
linguistics.  The remaining thirteen chapters are grouped into three
parts, each with a title of the form “Non-canonical syntax in X
varieties of English”, where X is successively “historical”,
“register-based”, and “non-native”.
Of the eighteen contributors (several chapters are co-authored), half
(by place of work) are German; four are American, three British, one
Dutch and one Swiss.
I take it to be axiomatic that one can only describe a given usage as
non-canonical if one recognizes it as an alternative to some
particular usage seen as canonical, and the contributors are well
aware that there are different ways of defining what makes a usage
canonical.  Pham and Leuckert, and many of their contributors,
distinguish “theory-based” from “frequency-based” definitions.  ‘I met
Sigrid’ is canonical and ‘Sigrid I met’ is not, because SVO is a much
more frequent clause order than OSV; and they quote Biber et al.
(2021) as identifying ‘yeah’ as the canonical positive response to a
yes–no question because it is “considerably more frequent than ‘yes’
”.  On the other hand some linguists (Pham and Leuckert cite
Huddleston and Pullum 2002) use “canonical” in a more theoretical way,
to mean something like (in terms of early versions of generative
grammar) a sentence structure to which no optional transformations
have applied, so that structures involving negation, interrogation,
passivization, subordination, or clause co-ordination would all be
non-canonical.  (This makes it clear that for non-canonical structures
to be “alternatives” to canonical structures does not imply, for these
linguists, that the meanings are identical; a negated sentence
definitely does not mean the same as its positive counterpart.)
The theory-based and frequency-based concepts often conflict, as the
contributors recognize.  Christine Günther, discussing phrasal verbs
such as ‘pick up’, points out that, from a theoretical standpoint,
moving the particle to the far side of the object (‘John picked the
book up’ rather than ‘John picked up the book’) is the non-canonical
option – it involves an optional transformation, and creates greater
processing load for the hearer.  Yet in spoken English it is also the
more frequent option, and if the object is an unstressed pronoun it is
the only option:  *‘John picked up her’.
There are other differences in how contributors think about
canonicity.  Gea Dreschler writes about a certain construction having
become “more non-canonical” over time, whereas I have the impression
that most contributors see “canonical” as an adjective like
“pregnant”, a yes/no property rather than a cline.  And although I
said that it is axiomatic that a usage can only be called
non-canonical by contrast with some particular “canonical” usage, this
is evidently not an axiom for Heidrun Dorgeloh and Anja Wanner, who
discuss an exchange ‘That one on the news has been out in the ocean
for a while’ — ‘Really?’, and comment “we cannot say with certainty
which canonical sentence [the] utterance ‘Really?’ is the reduced
version of”.  This implies that, for them, ‘Really?’ is clearly
non-canonical.  Douglas Biber, Stacey Wizner, and Randi Reppen see
one-word conversational responses such as ‘OK’, ‘yeah’, ‘oh’ as
non-canonical in a theoretical sense because “they depart from ‘basic’
structures”, suggesting that for them a basic structure must be a main
clause – what a schoolteacher would call a “complete sentence”.
A number of chapters discuss interesting areas of English grammar that
were new to me.  I found some of the material in the “historical” part
particularly rewarding.  Gea Dreschler discusses what she calls
“full-verb inversion”, as in the second conjunct of the example ‘They
have a great big tank in the kitchen, and in the tank are sitting all
these pots’ – where the subject of ‘are sitting’ has been moved after
the verb phrase, and its normal place has instead been allotted to a
prepositional phrase which creates a link to the first conjunct.
Dreschler points out that this verb-second pattern, where the verb
phrase is always the second constituent of a clause whether the first
constituent is the subject or some other element, is standard in
modern German and Dutch, but was obsolescent in Old English, and has
re-emerged in present-day English in a rather different form such that
it is restricted to specialized cases:  the verb must be intransitive,
the constituent preceding the verb must be strongly linked to what
came before the clause in question, and the subject must be long and
new rather than given.   Dreschler finds that these restrictions seem
to have been post-1900 innovations.
Louise Mycock and Sharon Glaas discuss what they call ProTags, such as
‘that’ in ‘It’s good quality, that’, which are tacked on to clauses
that would have been syntactically and semantically complete without
the tag, and which add nothing to the meaning – in the example, the
word ‘it’ assumes that the hearer knows what is referred to, and if he
doesn’t then ‘that’ will make it no clearer.  Mycock and Glaas define
the “core, subjective meaning” of most ProTag examples as
“[expressing/reinforcing] a speaker’s commitment to [a proposition]
‘p’ ”, though they find cases to which that cannot apply, for instance
a question “Was it a big air raid shelter, that?”
Perhaps surprisingly, although the ProTag construction is rare at
present and (as far as Mycock and Glaas can tell from the available
data) always has been rare, it has a long history.  They investigate
this via a corpus of thousands of plays (which, though written, are
attempts to reflect spoken usage), dating back as far as the
thirteenth century, in which the earliest example was from 1594:  “Ill
tidings for my Lady these”.  One aspect of the construction has
changed:  the ProTag pronoun is either ‘this’ or ‘that’ far more often
than any other pronoun, but whereas down to the late nineteenth
century ‘this’ was more frequent, often far more frequent, than
‘that’, in post-1960 British English ‘that’ is more than twice as
frequent as ‘this’ in the ProTag role, although ‘these’ continues to
be more frequent than ‘those’.  (Mycock and Glaas adumbrate a possible
explanation, but I believe they would not claim this to be more than
speculative.)  Mycock and Glaas’s chapter leads me to wonder how usual
it is for such an out-of-the-way and largely redundant spoken-only
construction to survive in a language over several centuries.
Irregular inflected forms of infrequent words often drop out of the
language (in recent writings I often see the verb ‘thrive’ conjugated
as ‘thrived’ rather than ‘throve’, for instance), and this is a
natural development:  if a speaker encounters an irregular form too
rarely to remember it, the form will drop out and automatically be
replaced by the regular formation.  Why did the ProTag construction
not drop out of English likewise?
EVALUATION
This book is helpful if one wants to understand how the concept
“canonical” has been used and understood within academic linguistics –
and Chapter 2 in particular makes it clear that it has been used much
more widely than I appreciated before reading Leuckert and Pham’s
book.
On the other hand, I am not convinced by the contributors’ shared
assumption that canonicity _should_ be a standard linguistic concept.
The very fact that “canonical” and “non-canonical” have been used in
so many different and sometimes vague ways must call into question
whether they are useful concepts for thinking about the nature of
human language.  “Canonical” structures are not, or not always, more
natural than “non-canonical” alternatives.  Devyani Sharma calls ‘a
child sat in the mud’ a “canonical” clause, as against non-canonical
variants such as ‘in the mud sat a child’ or ‘she sat in the mud, that
child’ (or, I imagine Sharma might have added, though she does not
mention this variant) ‘there was a child sitting in the mud’.  Yet
Sharma’s “canonical” example is fairly unnatural:  English has a
strong tendency to avoid indefinite noun phrases in subject position.
Similarly, Sandra Götz and Kathrin Kircili treat as “non-canonical” an
example sentence which begins ‘It was reported to Minivan News that at
5 pm …’ and continues with more than 24 further words describing what
happened at that time (a gathering of protesters outside the High
Commission of the Maldives in Ceylon).  Yet if this long logical
subject beginning ‘that at 5 pm …’ had been placed in the “canonical”
subject position at the start of the sentence, and ‘was reported to
Minivan News’ postponed to follow the description of the protest, the
result would have read fairly absurdly if written, and would have been
well-nigh incomprehensible, spoken.
The concept of canonicity becomes particularly questionable when
Theresa Neumaier and Sven Leuckert discuss the dificulty of
determining which structures are canonical in English as a Lingua
Franca (ELF) – i.e. English as spoken among people who are not native
speakers.  If ELF is treated as a language in its own right rather
than an imperfect (though often fully adequate) attempt to approximate
to  native-speaker English, I do not understand what it could mean for
ELF to have canons of correctness or normality.  (That might be
meaningful if ELF were to be explicitly codified, along the lines of
C.K. Ogden’s Basic English, but it does not appear that Neumaier and
Leuckert have anything like that in mind.)
In my “Summary” section I picked out two of the historical chapters as
ones I found worthwhile.  Yet neither of these chapters would lose
anything in interest or value, it seems to me, if all their references
to canonicity were deleted.
It strikes me that the book embodies more than a whiff of the
intellectual fallacy of essentialism:  trying to understand an aspect
of the world by beginning from the words in current use to describe
it, and assuming that they each have some definite application, rather
than investigating the way the world is and adapting one’s descriptive
language to fit what one finds.  Ultimately, after reading the book
the only single sense for “canonical” I can see that would fit most or
all of the contributors’ discussions is “structures that a language
teacher would choose to introduce to a class of beginners”.  This is a
meaningful concept, and considering how intertwined European academic
“Anglistik” is with Teaching of English as a Foreign Language, it is
not surprising to find it moulding these contributors’ “take” on
English grammar.  But is it a useful concept for scientific
investigation of language?  Leuckert and Pham believe it is:  in the
concluding sentence of their book, they assert that “Syntactic
(non-)canonicity is … one of the most fascinating topics in structural
linguistics”.  I am not convinced.
REFERENCES
Biber, D., et al.  2021.  Grammar of Spoken and Written English.  John
Benjamins (Amsterdam).
Huddleston, R., and G. Pullum, eds.  2002.  The Cambridge Grammar of
the English Language.  Cambridge University Press.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Geoffrey Sampson graduated in Chinese Studies from Cambridge
University, and his academic career was spent partly in Linguistics
and partly in Informatics, with intervals in industrial research.
After retiring as professor emeritus from Sussex University in 2009,
he spent several years as Research Fellow at the University of South
Africa. He has published contributions to most areas of Linguistics,
as well as to other subjects. “Structural Linguistics in the 21st
Century”, a sequel to Sampson’s popular “Schools of Linguistics”, came
out in 2024.



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