This book explores subjectless ing- and edsupplement constructions in the recent history of English from a corpus-based perspective. Supplements are constructions in the clausal periphery that do not fulfil a core syntactic function within the matrix clause. Their presence (or absence) does not typically have syntactic, semantic or grammatical consequences for either the structure or the interpretation of the clause. Despite their peripheral status, supplements are prototypically linked to the main clause in different respects. The analysis of this nonfinite supplements allows for a better characterisation of the periphery of the clause in terms of more and less prototypical supplements, and describes diachronic variation in Late Modern English and Presentday English along the features that characterize the construction.

This volume includes eleven papers pertaining to different areas of linguistics and organised into three sections. Part I contains diachronic studies which cover data from Middle English to Present-Day English and which explore phenomena such as the status of extender tags, the distribution of free adjuncts, post-auxiliary ellipsis, and the use of 'ephemeral' concessive adverbial subordinators. Part II comprises studies on grammar and language processing dealing with topics such as the interaction between syntactic and structural complexity and verbal agreement with collective subjects, the influence of distributivity and concreteness on verbal agreement, the interaction of complexity and efficiency in pronoun omission in Indian English and Singapore English, and the methods and approaches used for grammar teaching in modern EFL/ESL textbooks. Finally, Part III revolves around lexis, discourse and pragmatics, with papers that discuss the development of the discoursal representation of social actors in Argentinian newspapers after the military dictatorship, the construction of women's gender identity through positive and negative emotions in women's magazines, and spelling-to-sound correspondence on Twitter.