The Verb Phrase in English

1. Introduction Bas Aarts, Joanne Close, Geoffrey Leech and Sean Wallis; 2. Choices over time: methodological issues in investigating current change Bas Aarts, Joanne Close and Sean Wallis; 3. Recent shifts with three nonfinite verbal complements in English: data from the 100 million word TIME Corpus (1920s–2000s) Mark Davies; 4. Verb structures in twentieth-century British English Nicholas Smith and Geoffrey Leech; 5. Nominalizing the verb phrase in academic science writing Douglas Biber and Bethany Gray; 6. The verb phrase in contemporary Canadian English Sali Tagliamonte; 7. Recent change and grammaticalization Manfred Krug and Ole Schützler; 8. The progressive verb in modern American English Magnus Levin; 9. I was just reading this article - on the expression of recentness and the English past progressive Meike Pfaff, Alexander Bergs and Thomas Hoffmann; 10. Bare infinitival complements in present-day English Marcus Callies; 11. Operator and negative contraction in spoken British English: a change in progress José Ramón Varela Pérez; 12. The development of comment clauses Gunther Kaltenböck; 13. The perfect in spoken British English Jill Bowie, Sean Wallis and Bas Aarts; 14. Changes in the verb phrase in legislative language in English Christopher Williams; 15. Modals and semi-modals of obligation in American English: some aspects of developments from 1990 until the present day Stig Johansson.