Over the past four decades, I have produced a series of books characterising aspects of the syntax of standard English (Radford 1981, 1988, 1997a, 1997b, 2004a, 2004b, 2009a, 2009b, 2016). During that time, I have become increasingly aware (mainly from paying close attention to the language used on popular British radio and TV stations) that in colloquial English we find noncanonical structures (i.e. structures not reported in grammars of standard varieties of English) which are very different in nature from the structures found in the kind of standard English used e.g. in national newspapers or news bulletins on radio and TV. I have used occasional examples of such colloquial English structures as the basis of some of the exercise material in my syntax books, asking readers to describe how the non-canonical structures in the exercise material differ from the canonical structures described in the main text. Examples of non-canonical structures mentioned in earlier books of mine are given below (where the constituents of interest are highlighted in bold or italics):

Such structures are interesting for (at least) five different reasons.