THE SYNTAX OF TOPIC ORGANISATION IN ENGLISH AND GREEK*
Philip King: University of Birmingham
* This paper is based on a presentation originally made at the Fourth International Symposium on
the Description/Comparison of English and Greek, held by the English Department, Aristotle
University of Thessaloniki in April 1990.
Abstract: Although formal comparisons between the grammar and syntax of English and Greek are
relatively readily available, there has been less work done with a functional focus at the discourse
level. However, dissertation drafts produced in English by Greek students show errors in topic
signalling which can be traced back to a conflict between the permissible patterns of English
academic writing and those of Greek.
The present study considers and compares two features in particular: how the sentence-initial topic
is incorporated into the syntax of the sentence, and the function of the -ing clause, comparing the
latter with the function of -όντας clauses in Greek.
Illustrative data are taken from academic and technical sources for both English and Greek, while
examples to highlight mismatches are taken from samples of student writing. It is shown that,
although similarly structured patterns occur in both languages, there may be functional or
conventional discourse restrictions on their occurrence in English in particular which make the
establishment of equivalence complex, and account at least in part for the errors made in producing
English academic discourse.
1. BACKGROUND:
The motivation for this paper arises out of my work at the University of Birmingham, where I am
one of a small group of lecturers constituting the English for Overseas Students Unit, which as one
of its principal duties provides English language and study skills support to such students. It was in
the course of working with a Greek student on the English of his PhD that I became aware that,
while at the larger rhetorical discourse level (Connor & Kaplan 1987, Houghton 1990) his writing
was well-structured, and while his vocabulary, grammar and syntax were generally accurate, there
were some problems with his English which could be seen as possibly due to the fact that he was
employing constructions which were in general possible both in English and in Greek, but which
were not appropriate at the particular points in his writing because they had the effect of
highlighting the wrong information.
Taking data from the student's draft as a basis, and drawing on further data from academic and
technical writings in both Greek and English, this paper compares the syntax and function of two
structures in Greek and their equivalents in English. I am not concerned with the philosophical
problem of the nature of equivalence; I take it as established in the minds of teachers and learners,
or as indicated in the dictionary. The interesting question is, where we have an apparent
grammatical or translation equivalence, to what extent are things in fact really "the same" and
where if anywhere do things diverge? As will be shown, there appear to be important respects in
which the equivalence does not hold. Also, the fact that "things went wrong" at this level in the
process of composing the thesis suggests that the structures may be perhaps carrying different
messages in English and Greek. The structures in question are, firstly, topicalising phrases like
όσον αφορά, όσο για and so on in Greek and as for, as far as X is concerned, and the like in
English; and secondly clausal uses of the -όντας form in Greek compared with clausal uses of the ing form in English.
The corpus from which the Greek examples are taken consists of a few articles from Οικονομικός
Ταχυδρόμος (of which the Economist is the nearest equivalent in English), the book Η Ελλάδα
προς το 2000, a collection of papers by economists and social scientists, and the journal Γλώσσα,
which covers topics in applied linguistics. The search was conducted by eye. For English, the
corpus comprises computer-held files of New Scientist, various academic papers principally in
Engineering and Plant Biology, and some economics text. This was searched using a
concordancing program developed by my colleague Tim Johns (1986). The student's thesis is on a
19th century Greek poet.
There is thus a match between the three corpuses only at a very general level, that of academic and
technical writing. This clearly limits the strength of any claims that can be made; on the other hand
there are serious practical difficulties in the way of achieving a tight match between the Greek,
English and student's corpuses while maintaining a size of corpus which enables these particular
phenomena to be studied statistically. More detailed work, in particular the building up of large
computer-held corpuses would in the long term provide us with a better quality of information.
2. AS FOR ΟΣΟ ΓΙΑ: SENTENCE TOPIC
In both Greek and English, the beginning of the sentence is held to have an importance in the
information structure of the discourse. Thus Tzartzanos (1963, II, 273) says apropos of Greek word
order:
Γενικά σε μια πρόταση αυτοτελή και ανεξάρτητη ένας όρος της που τονίζεται
ιδιαιτέρως, ήτοι που εκφέρεται με έμφασι ή αντιδιαστολή, παίρνει συνήθως θέση
στην αρχή της προτάσεως (σπάνια στο τέλος). Η μεσαία θέσις είναι συνήθως θέσις
του όρου της προτάσεως, ο οποίος εκφέρεται χωρίς καμιά έμφαση. Σε μια σειρά πάλι
σχετικών προτάσεων μιάς περιόδου ο κάθε όρος κάθε προτάσεως παίρνει θέσι προς
την αρχή της, καθόσον σχετίζεται με τα προηγούμενα, και προς το τέλος, καθόσον
σχετίζεται με τα επόμενα.
(In general, in an independent clause, an item which is stressed, ie which is uttered
with emphasis or is contrastive, generally goes at the beginning of the clause, rarely at
the end. Middle position is occupied by an item receiving no particular emphasis. In
a series of clauses in a sentence, an item goes at the beginning of its clause if it relates
to the previous context, at the end if it relates to a following one.)
For the general picture with regard to English, see Brown and Yule (1983, 70) and Halliday (1985,
38) for discussion. For Halliday, the initial element of the clause is what he calls the theme, and
topic is then part or all of the theme. The theme is "the element which serves as the point of
departure of the message; it is that with which the clause is concerned". In writing, "a well-chosen
theme has to fulfil two criteria: it must take up an idea that has already been introduced, and it must
have enough importance in the developing text to deserve its favoured position" (Pereira 1984, 249,
talking of the development of children's writing). In this paper, I use topic to mean that constituent
of the clause which occurs as first item, and make no further distinction between topic and theme.
For a writer, the problem is twofold: (i) choice of topic, and (ii) how to link it grammatically to the
rest of the sentence. Impressionistically, students encounter fewer problems with the former than
with the latter, perhaps because as is clear from Tzartzanos (op cit), what is important in some way
comes at the beginning, and this is common to English and Greek (as well as other languages, cf Li
and Thompson (1981, 15) on the position with regard to Chinese), and as writers who have
advanced some way beyond the stage of competence noted by Perera, research students will have a
preformed, and perhaps language-independent notion of topic (in the Hallidayan sense of "theme"
quoted above). The second problem however is language-specific. Both Greek and English can
front different constituents of the clause, but will differ in the readiness (verifiable statistically, in
principle) with which they do so. Thus, English can for instance front objects ("this you must
see!") and even verbs ("knocked me right out, it did!"). Nothing is ever quite impossible.
However, the similarity between English and Greek ends here; what is normally possible in Greek
may not be normally possible in English; what is normally possible in one genre in Greek may not
be quite so normally possible in the corresponding genre in English, and vice versa. It is important
to note that we are not concerned in this paper with "what is possible in the language" or "what the
language allows" at a grammatical level so much as with what constitutes an acceptable written
product at a discourse level, within a particular, broadly defined, genre.
The "as for" construction announces the theme explicitly (Halliday 1985, 40). Halliday says that
the theme "is then picked up later in the clause by the appropriate pronoun", giving as an example:
"As for my aunt, the duke has given her that teapot". My data from technical and academic English
suggest this view needs some modification; in fact this view is in some ways an expression of the
problem. In passing I would note that the use (Halliday is not alone in this) of examples which are
either made up or very short or relate to a particular variety of the language can often give rise to
difficulties. Picking up by a pronoun may work in speech in English, but if it is done in academic
writing, the feeling is often that the sentence would have been better rewritten; a large number of
examples in English do not have any grammatical pick-up, thus:
(1)
As for the huge variability in the number of contradictory results, Moore says that
NCI applies only the most stringent criteria to their decisions: a significant tumour response to a
given dose in two species or two sexes.
(2)
As for the Blue Skies criteria, we may imagine that a better understanding of
photosynthesis either may lead to, say, better synthetic devices, or to new insights into control
engineering, leading say to advances in the control of complex fermentation processes.
(3)
As for the physical appearance of the people who left behind their stone tools and
food refuse, Singer and Wymer can say little because, compared with animal bones, there are few
human remains in the deposits and they are mostly fragments of skulls and jawbones and teeth.
Indeed, it is not possible without some knowledge of the subject in each case to see what the
relationship is between the "as for" adjunct and the rest of the sentence; if anything, the relationship
appears to be between some general, superordinate notion introduced by "as for", and some detail
aspect, comprising the rest of the sentence. But there seems to be an inference that can be supplied:
in (1) for example there is possibly a denial of culpability; in (2) the argument is that
photosynthesis research could have practical payoff (so either it is not simply blue skies research or
alternatively blue skies research should be supported). Only in (3) is there a clear direct
paraphrasable connection (Singer and Wyman can say little about the physical appearance).
There are however examples which do have the pick-up:
(4)
As for the conversion of mass into energy, this does affect stars ...
(5)
As for Vivian (Lord) Bowden, I can only report that he once offered me ...
These however appear to come rather more from technical journalism, and it should also be noted
that (4) is marked (... does affect ...), anticipating a reader's objection. In (5) the pronoun pick-up is
embedded in a report clause. In the context of PhD writing, which has to be of publishable
standard (5) in particular, has a number of inappropriate features. The sentences from the PhD
draft which seem less acceptable are those in which the topic noun group is in fact picked up by a
pronoun. Although the field (Greek literature) is distinct from the fields in the examples above, this
does not seem to affect the point at issue. The pick-up pronoun is underlined.
STUDENT PRODUCTION: LESS ACCEPTABLE TOPICALISATION:
(6)
Regarding the evaluations of Kalvos's work, either by foreign scholars or by native
critics who, for one reason or another expressed them in another European language, one can
establish that they do not diverge from those which have been described in the previous chapters of
the present part.
(7)
Finally as regards the Anthologies of Modern Greek Poetry between the years 18301880, it must be noted that several of them contain excerpts from Kalvos's poems, and not the
complete Odes.
(8)
A parallel phenomenon to Kalvos, as regards the reception of his work, is C P
Cavafy who was initially known as a poet of the hellenic diaspora.
These sentences were initially (and independently of each other) felt to be less acceptable because
there seemed to be a clearer way of putting them. Note that the student does not have any
grammatical problems in the traditional sense, and that the vocabulary is also appropriate. What
seems to be happening is that at a rhetorical level collocations are being assembled in a manner
appropriate to Greek (... do not diverge from ...), and, of more concern to us here, the topic is being
grammatically detached from within a sentence when there is in fact another mechanism for
getting across what the writer wanted to convey. It is as if the writer has a good but not extensive
enough repertoire of means of grammaticalising the topic, and is forced to compensate by recourse
to the last resort of the explicit topicalising phrase. A possible rewrite of (6) could be:
(6')
Evaluations of Kalvos's work, whether by foreign scholars or by Greek critics who
for one reason or another expressed themselves in other languages, can be shown to put forward
the same views as those which have been described in the previous chapters of the present part.
This is deliberately a minimal change, to show the effects of removing the topicalising phrase;
other changes might be argued for, but they are beyond the scope of this paper.
MORE ACCEPTABLE TOPICALISATION:
(9)
As to Kalvos's compiled Grammar of Modern Greek, it was to be published in F
Nolan's manual, A Harmonical Grammar of the principal Ancient and Modern Languages.
(10) As regards the debates on the Greek language and the quarrels between the
Demoticists and the supporters of katharevousa, it is clear that the poems of Kalvos offered no
ammunition for either side.
(9) and (10), also produced by the same student, were felt to be more acceptable. Note that the
argument for the acceptability of (9) depends on the extended context, while (10) has no pronoun
pick-up.
In summing up so far, it should be pointed out that, as usual with corpus-based or real-text analysis,
we are not dealing with an all-or-nothing situation; this is not a grammatical error, but a question of
how far a piece of writing conforms to a norm for its genre, a norm which may be in terms of
frequency (more than a certain density of occurrence and a feature becomes obtrusive) or in terms
of what we may loosely regard as collocation (is this feature patterning in a characteristic or noncharacteristic way?). The more it deviates from what is felt to be the norm, the more problematic it
becomes.
TOPICALISATION IN GREEK
The citations below come from academic prose; all except (14) have a pronoun pick-up, which
typically may be the following subject. I do not have a highly developed instinct in this regard, but
would incline to say that there appears to be nothing wrong with this pick-up in Greek. In fact it
would seem unnatural to me to omit the pronoun in (11) and (12): it should be remembered that the
pronoun in the Greek system does not serve the same function as the English one in the English
system; in particular in (12) the pronoun form αυτός makes it clear that grammatically reference is
to πληθυσμός rather than μέγεθος. (The English translations of the Greek sentences from here on
are provided to highlight the point at issue; they are not intended as accurate renderings on points
of detail.)
(11) Ιδίως όσον αφορά τα πανεπιστήμια και τα άλλα συναφή ιδρύματα, αυτά
λειτουργούσαν λιγότερο ως φορείς επαγγελματικης εξειδίκευσης και περισσότερα ως κέντρα
αναπαραγωγής στελεχών για τα κυρίαρχα κοινωνικά στρώματα (δημοσια διοίκηση, δικαιοσύνη,
υπηρεσίες κ.λπ.)
(In particular as far as universities and similar institutions are concerned, these functioned
less as providers of professional specialisations and more as centres for turning out middle-class
managers within the public administration, the legal system, public services, etc.)
(12) Όσον αφορά το συνολικό μέγεθος τoυ φοιτητικού πληθυσμού στην τριτοβαθμιαία,
αυτoς ενδέχεται για τoυς λόγους πoυ πρoαναφέρθηκαν να παραμείνει σταθερος ή να μειωθεί ελαφρά
μέχρι το 2000.
(As for the overall size of the student population in tertiary education, this [sc. population]
is likely for the reasons already mentioned to remain steady or decline slightly up to the year
2000.)
(13) Όσον αφoρά τους αποφoίτoυς των ΤΕΙ, αν τα ιδρύματά τους ανταποκριθούν εγκαίρως
και πληρως στις ανοικτές ή λανθάνουσες ανάγκες της παραγωγής - ιδιαίτερα δε στον κρίσιμο τομέα
των εφαρμογών -, αυτοί οχι μόνον θα απορροφηθούν απο την αγορά εργασίας, αλλά θα
δημιουργήσουν και μια πρόσθετη, νέα ζήτηση γι' αυτούς.
(As for the graduates from the technical colleges, if their institutions respond fully in time
to the overt or latent needs of production, particularly in the critical area of applications - they will
not only be absorbed by the labour market but will create a new additional demand for them [ie for
more graduates].)
(14) Όσον αφορά τις πολιτισμικές και εκπαιδευτικές δραστηριότητες, oι εκπαιδευτικoί
oργανισμoί πoυ ασχολούνται με την αρχική ή συνεχή επιμόρφωση εκπαιδευτικών διαπιστώνουν μια
αδράνεια ως προς την πρoσέλευση νέου κοινού.
(As for cultural and educational activities, educational organisations involved with preservice or in-service training have noticed an inertia as regards bringing in newcomers.)
3. AS FOR -ING AND -ΟΝΤΑΣ
The uses of the -ing and -όντας which are compared here relate to their clausal function. I am not
concerned with postmodifying -ing as in "a book costing more than that". The status of -ing and όντας clauses can be seen as a matter of support for the main clause (or for a superordinate clause)
in a sentence. The main clause sets out a proposition, or pushes forward the argument and, in
Halliday's terms (op cit, 196), the secondary clause expands on it. The problem for the writer is to
determine what constitutes the main information and what constitutes the subsidiary support or
extension. In a traditional sense, "speaking at a meeting in Birmingham, she stressed the
importance of the new policy" and "she spoke at a meeting in Birmingham, stressing the
importance of the new policy", as pieces of sentence grammar, are equally acceptable. In discourse
terms however, it is possible to make the wrong choice, so to speak. There will be a topic, in the
broader sense of paragraph topic or discourse topic (Brown and Yule (op cit, 71), which will be
better supported by one choice of prioritising rather than the other. In general, a reader will expect
the features of the main clause to pick up preceding points, or adumbrate features which will in fact
be picked up later, while the supporting clause information is on the whole not expected to
reappear.
The student examples 18 - 20 all run into problems of what is highlighted, while another problem,
which affects 21 in particular is the question of clarity of relationship. The participial clause can
often be glossed as temporal, causal, hypothetical, manner, concession, or final (Tzartzanos, op cit,
I, 336, writing of -όντας, but the same point holds for English). However, there is a question of
how easily the precise relationship can be recovered by a reader, or how much needs to be
explicitly signalled by the writer in accordance with the conventions of the language in which the
text is being composed. It is at least possible that since the relationship has to be inferred, the
preferred inferences might be different in the two languages.
(15) Gorgias, praising exuberantly the contribution of the Heptanesian School to Modern
Greek Letters in a topical comment of his (1849), makes a reference to Kalvos.
(16) Iosif de Kigalas deals with the poet in his book Σχεδίασμα κατόπτρoυ της
Νεoελληνικής Φιλoλoγίας (1846), speaking about the Odes and Kalvos's religious translations of
the Book of Common Prayer.
(17) ... and they saw as an unfortunate event the fact that Kalvos's muse had stopped
singing so rapidly, depriving Modern Greek literature of a quality poetry.
Again, the initial, unanalysed response to these sentences was simply that they could be improved.
The reasons are partly internal, partly with reference to the broader context. Thus, (15) suffers
from the interposition between subject and verb of the -ing clause. (16) could be collapsed into one
clause: "Iosif de Kigalas deals with Kalvos's Odes and translations of the Book of Common Prayer
in his book Σχεδίασμα κατοπτρου της Νεοελληνικής Φιλολογίας (1846).", since the propositional
content of "deals with" does not seem to be not sufficiently developed by "speaking about" One
possible rewrite might be "In a paean of praise for the contribution .... Gorgias makes reference to
Kalvos." (17) seems more natural if "depriving" is preceded by "thereby", stressing that this is
result, not accompanying circumstances. (It is also improved by other changes to the form: "they
saw it as unfortunate that ...", and "early" in preference to "rapidly".) I do not want to argue
strongly that the participles here are simply the result of interference from Greek, and it is an
almost impossible task to find closely parallel sentences in Greek academic writing. For
comparison however, here are some sentences from academic or technical writing in Greek, many
of which would have in English a more satisfactory rendering than a simple participle clause. In
most cases one can probably keep the main - subordinate relationship, but in some, this will need
revising; indeed in 18 the relationship could be reversed.
(18) Συνεχίζoντας τo πoλύπλευρo αναπτυξιακό της έργo η Εμπoρική Τράπεζα, με τη
συμβολή και της θυγατρικής της εταιρίας ΜΕΤΕΚ, παρoυσίασε πρoσφατα στη Βέρoια μια νέα
ολοκληρωμένη μελέτη για τις αναπτυξιακές δυνατόυητες της Κεντρικής και Δυτικής Μακεδoνίας.
(Continuing its extensive development work, the Bank of Commerce, with the assistance of
its daughter company METEK recently presented in Veria a new integrated study on development
possibilities in Central and Western Macedonia.)
An English version might equally well be expressed as "The Commercial Bank, with the assistance
of its daughter company METEK, has continued its extensive development work with the recent
presentation in Veria of a new integrated study ..."
(19) Παρoυσιάζοντας τη μελέτη oι κ.κ. ...... επισήμαναν oτι η κύρια επιδίωξη είναι η
διερεύνηση των πρoϋποθέσεων πoυ υπάρχουν για την ενεργoποίηση τoυ παραγωγικού δυναμικού της
περιοχής και η επεξεργασία συγκεκριμένων πρoτάσεων για ανάπτυξη επενδυτικής δραστηριότητας.
(Presenting the study, Messrs ...... pointed out that the principal objective is to broaden the
requirements for activating the productive potential of the region and to work out concrete
proposals for the development of investment activity.)
(19) shows a good functional match between the -ing and -oντας participles; indeed this pattern, of
a brief introductory participle clause followed by a reporting verb seems to be a common one in
both languages.
Other Greek participle clauses do not map in the same way:
(20) Λίγo αργότερα όμως o ίδιoς μαθητής χειρίζεται λανθασμένα την εν λoγω λέξη
συμπληρώνοντας πρόoταση άσκησης: Τα παιδιά κληροδοτούν (αντί κληρονομούν) τoυς γoνείς.
(A little later on however the same pupil misuses the word in question, completing a
sentence of an exercise: children bequeath to (instead of inherit from) their parents.)
In Greek, the participle clause gives the grounds on which the assertion of the main clause is made.
In English, the participle clause can do that, but seems to be fighting as well with an intentional
interpretation (in order to make a mistake, he puts in such-and-such a word). The problem here
may in fact be a lexical one: the phrase "completing a sentence" in English seems to draw a lot of
attention to the nature of the exercise type or (wrongly executed) activity. More natural, since this
is not an unusual phenomenon, might be to choose a semantically emptier word: "A little later on
however the same pupil misuses the word in question, putting [or writing] 'children bequeath their
parents'".
What also seems to happen in Greek is that the -oντας participle may have an actor other than the
subject of the main sentence. This practice is frowned on in English (the dangling participle) but
has not as far as I know attracted any attention from the hosts of prescriptive grammarians who
pronounce on Greek (but most traditional prescriptive grammarians of both languages, be it
observed in passing, concentrate on particular bêtes noires, while ignoring many other problematic
phenomena).
(21) Εξάλλoυ γνωρίζoυμε, oτι o κυριότερoς ρόλoς των τραπεζών συνίσταται στην
επαναφoρά των απoταμιευμάτων τoυ κoινού στo παραγωγικό κύκλωμα, πρoσφέρoντας μάλιστα και
τoυς απαραίτητoυς μηχανισμούς για τo χρoνικό τoυς μετασχηματισμό.
(In addition we know that the chief role of the banks consists in the bringing-back of the
savings of the public into the production cycle, offering in particular the necessary mechanisms for
their transformation over time.)
Here it is the banks which offer the mechanisms, not the role. This basically additive relationship
can only work as a participle clause in English if "banks" becomes the subject; alternatively in this
particular case, "consists in" could be followed by two -ing forms, giving a parallelism in the
English grammar which is implied in the Greek, thus: " ... the chief role of the banks consists in
getting public savings back into the production cycle, and specifically in offering the necessary
mechanisms ...". Possibly (and a subject expert could verify this), the relationship is causal: The
chief role of the banks is to channel savings back into investment, and this they can do precisely
because they possess the appropriate mechanisms.
4. AS FOR THE CONCLUSION
The examples discussed here are only a small sample, but illustrate the complexities of attempting a
functional matching of the two languages at a grammatico-syntactic level. Despite the apparent
equivalence between the grammatical statements of Halliday and Tzartzanos, a comparison of the
ways in which practised writers achieve their purposes in each language shows that no simple
functional mapping of original Greek text and original English text is possible. Marmaridou's
(1987) argument for semantico-pragmatic, language-neutral parameters of meaning might be a
way of getting systematically at the matching problem, although as it stands it relates to source and
target language pairs of texts, while my concern and my students' is with production of a single
text in a foreign language (although it has been convenient in the present paper to translate certain
Greek sentences in order to illustrate how English would be more likely to handle certain features).
The examples also demonstrate the problems faced by students writing at an advanced level, who
may well have a basic lexical and grammatical competence in English, but who are not fully aware
of how these resources are exploited in constructing academic discourse. For them, a contrastive
study of how native-language and foreign-language academic discourse operates, with attention
drawn to differences in collocations, would clearly be beneficial. While matching pairs of texts are
unlikely to be found, one approach would be to set up computer-held corpuses of English and
Greek academic text, enabling statistical work to be done for example on grammatical and lexical
features, and to a limited extent (at least directly) on functions. General and specialised corpuses
exist for English at London, Lancaster and Birmingham Universities, and comparative computerbased research into English and French using concordancing has been started by Roussel (1991) at
the University of Nancy. This is a relatively new but already promising area, which will be of great
benefit to learners, teachers and researchers alike.
GREEK SOURCES:
Κατσoύλης, Ηλ., Γιαννίτσης Τ., Καζάκoς Π. (επιμέλεια) (1988) Η Ελλάδα πρoς τo 2000. Εκδόσεις
Παπαζήση - Friedrich Ebert Stiftung
Γλώσσα. Έκδoση Επιστημoνικής Ένωσης για Παιδεία, Αθήνα
Oικoνoμικός Ταχυδρόμος.
REFERENCES:
Brown, G and Yule, G (1983) Discourse analysis. Cambridge University Press
Connor, U and Kaplan, R (eds) (1987) Writing across languages: Analysis of L2 text. Addison
Wesley
Halliday, M A K (1984) An introduction to functional grammar. Arnold
Houghton, D Contrastive rhetoric: Has it anything to say for the EAP tutor? Ms, University of
Birmingham
Johns, T (1986) Microconcord: A language-learner's research tool. System 14(2): 151-62
Li, C N and Thompson, S (1981) Mandarin Chinese: A functional reference grammar. University
of California Press
Marmaridou, A S S (1987) Semantic and pragmatic parameters of meaning Journal of Pragmatics
(11, 721 - 736)
Perera, K (1984) Children's writing and reading: Analysing classroom language. Blackwell
Roussel, F (1991) Bilingual concordancing for language comparison in Johns, T and King, P (eds)
English Language Research Journal, new series, 4 (1991), University of Birmingham.
Τζάρτζανoς, Α ¸Νεoελληνική Σύνταξις Έκδoσις Oργανισμός Εκδόσεως Διδακτικων Βιβλίων (2
vols, vol I 1946, vol 2 1963).
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
I am grateful to Dr George Andreiomenos for allowing me to quote from drafts of his PhD thesis.