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.

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.