Word Order in a Contemporary Story for Children

The present study is intended as an introduction to word order in English and its use in a particular text type: a story for children. It is aimed at university students studying to become teachers of English as a second language at primary school level and teachers who are already working in this area. The study examines first what is meant by word order in English, looking briefly at word order within the phrase and then, more extensively, at word order within the sentence. It analyses what is meant by the term markedness in language and the implications it has for word order. Next it takes into consideration basic word order patterns in English, examining in particular the complex problem of the position of adverbial elements in the sentence. It then proceeds to examine the marked word order patterns found in the story under study. Finally, the relationship between word order and the information-bearing structure of the text is considered, with reference to Theme and Rheme, Communicative Dynamism and Functional Sentence Perspective. Some conclusions are then drawn with regard to certain patterns identified in the use of marked word order in the story in hand. In order to facilitate the understanding of the specific linguistic terms that have been used in this study, a glossary is provided at the end of the book. For easy consultation, the glossary is organised in alphabetical order and cross-references are marked in bold