Preface and acknowledgement......9

1. Introduction.....11

2. Linguistic units......19

2.1. Forms and functions.....21

2.2. Syntactic constituency.......30

2.3. Levels of syntactic constituency.....32

3. Clause functional categories and functions.....55

3.1. The subject.....57

3.2. The verbal.....66

3.3. The direct object......69

3.4.The indirect object.....73

3.5. The object complement.....83

3.6.The subject complement.....86

3.7.The adverbial.....88

3.8. Verb complementation and clause patterns.....92

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