Non-canonical syntax presents us with a fundamental puzzle: if there exists an unmarked canonical option, why would an alternative ever be used? Tom read the book exemplifies the default order of a sentence of Standard English. However, a speaker may express the same basic meaning utilising a quite different word order or construction: The book, Tom read; It was Tom who read the book; and Tom, he read the book are just some of the options. Indeed, constructions like these are by no means marginal in frequency. The availability of such non-canonical options is not unconstrained, and the nature of the restrictions we find exposes an inherent ambiguity in the term non-canonical itself. There are some linguists who investigate structures that deviate from the default order and thus encode information structure status (topic, focus, etc.) via syntactic means; other researchers investigate syntactic constructions deviating from the default order in varieties of English that are governed by rules which are not considered to be part of the canon of Present Day Standard English, including historical and non-standard varieties of English, such as World Englishes and Learner English.
Both strands of research offer insights into the non-canonical syntax of English, but work which draws together both perspectives on non-canonicity is vanishingly rare. This represents a missed opportunity: pooling the expertise of researchers with overlapping interests but distinct approaches will provide innovative perspectives on the nature of non-canonicity, as well as open up new directions in collaborative research. By casting the net wider in terms of empirical, methodological, and theoretical coverage, and by pursuing both their individual and collective research aims, the network’s members will provide fresh insights into and increase our understanding of not only the syntactic structure of English, but also syntactic structure and the nature of non-canonicity more generally.
During the network's running time (and certainly beyond!), the network's members will publish results from their projects. See the list of members and network-related publications.
The results of the network's projects will be published in a joint article co-written by all network members and some expert guests as well as an Open Access edited collection in the Studies in English Language series published by Cambridge University Press.