• dispelling the prescriptive myth that colloquial English utilises substandard structures characterised by a sloppy form of language which has no proper structure and is thus not worthy of the attention of serious scholars

• showing how supposedly ‘sloppy’ structures in which (e.g.) topics and relative pronouns are seemingly unlinked to their associated propositions actually involve a form of pragmatic linking which is found in other languages (e.g. Chinese, Japanese and Thai)

• highlighting the richness of non-standard English, illustrating this in terms of a vast panoply of novel authentic data sourced mainly from live, unscripted radio and TV broadcasts or the web

• adding to awareness of the range and nature of non-standard, nondialectal variation in colloquial English, and contributing novel data to debates about language typology and microvariation

• showing that the range of syntactic structures found in colloquial English can profitably be studied and understood from a formal syntactic perspective

• contributing to understanding the cartography of the clause periphery, employing (what in terms of cartographic work is) a novel source of data from authentic examples of spoken English

• showing that the clause periphery is the locus of much variation in syntax, with parametric variation reducible to the feature composition and spellout of functional heads

• showing how a usage-based approach to linguistic analysis can provide a fertile additional source of data which complements other (e.g. introspective and experimental) approaches