The book shows how the system of English predicate complementation has been undergoing an amazing amount of variation and change in recent centuries, and identifies explanatory principles to account for this change and variation, with evidence from large electronic corpora of both British and American English.

Autorentext
JUHANI RUDANKO Professor of English at the University of Tampere, Finland. His recent work has focused on the system of English predicate complementation in recent centuries, and on the pragmatic analysis of political discourse in the early American Republic.

Inhalt
List of Tables Acknowledgements Introduction On a Class of Resultatives in Recent English Innovative Resultatives in British and American English Emergent Alternation in Complement Selection: The Spread of the Transitive into -ing Construction to Verbs of Unflavored Causation Tracking and Explaining the Transitive out of ing Pattern in Recent and Current English Watching English Grammar Change: Variation and Change in the Grammar of Accustomed On Sentential Complements of Object , with Evidence from the Old Bailey Corpus Complements of Commit : Variation in the Grammar of an Innovative Verb Concluding Observations Notes References