A three-dimensional analysis of non-standard English

Our notion of what constitutes a grammar is in need of expansion in order to incorporate many aspects of language use which have either been ignored by linguists (often pushed into the rag-bag called performance) or have been dealt with as separate from syntax. This article is an attempt to provide useful lines along which such an expansion can proceed. This involves (at least) an investigation of the interrelationships between ideational, thematic and information structure. One crucial concept in relating various aspects of language use is the transformation, which is not conceived of as some formal mechanism of the syntactic component but as the process whereby the motivations for different surface versions of one and the same underlying input can be explained.