List of contributors

Chapters in this book

1. Prelim pages i
2. Table of contents v
3. Acknowledgements vii
4. List of contributors ix
5. Interrogating corpora to describe grammatical patterns 1
6. Part 1. Patterns in the verb phrase
7. Light verb constructions in the history of English 15
8. What happened to the English prefix, and could it stage a comeback? 35
9. The pattern to be a-hunting from Middle to Late Modern English 57
10. The present perfect and the preterite in Late Modern and Contemporary English 81
11. can and be able to in nineteenth-century Irish English 105
12. Part 2. Patterns in the noun phrase
13. Syntactic constraints on the use of dual form intensifiers in Modern English 131
14. Ma daddy wis dead chuffed 151
15. The case of focus 173
16. Part 3. Patterns in complementation structures
17. Null objects and sentential complements, with evidence from the Corpus of Historical American English 209
18. A new angle on infinitival and of - ing complements of afraid , with evidence from the TIME Corpus 223
19. Active and passive infinitive, ambiguity and non-canonical subject with ready 239
20. Part 4. Patterns of clause combining
21. The diffusion of English absolutes 265
22. It-clefts in English L1 and L2 academic writing 295
23. The speech functions of tag questions and their properties. A comparison of their distribution in COLT and LLC 321
24. Author index 351
25. Subject index 355