In terms of verb tense, the sentences “…abbreviations have always been part of the English language.” “…the recent news of a man who had been lying in a vegetative state for seven years…” and “…the 1960s, when the study of linguistics had hardly begun…”may be classified respectively as
The sentences “I recorded all my children over the years in some shape or form.”/ “It's a more sophisticated kind of communicative medium.” and “You get semantic threads running through it.” have syntactic elements that may be classified respectively as
The sentences “In the jaunty early chapters of A Little Book of Language, Crystal notes how, when his four children were young, he would study them.”, and “You don't talk to a linguist without having what you say taken down and used in evidence against you at some point in time.” contain, respectively, at least one
In the sentences “We are rearing a generation of kids who are more equitable and more understanding about the existence of language variety...” and “… some are academic but many are for the general inquisitive reader, including By Hook or by Crook: A Journey in Search of English and Shakespeare's Words, which was co-authored by his son, Ben.” one finds relative clauses that should be classified respectively as
The sentences “This all sounds very innocent, but books for children can be a contentious issue.” and “Language, as much as history, is part of a national identity and cannot escape contemporary debates.” should be classified respectively as
As to the relation between the advances of brainwaves scanning, also called brain imaging, and the understanding of language processing, Crystal thinks that