This collection charts the evolution of grammatical variation in Englishes from Late Middle English to the present, using corpus linguistic tools to address divergence and convergence in local and global perspectives. The book considers both diachronic and synchronic perspectives in grammatical variation across varieties of English across the UK, North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. The volume reflects on the questions of whether patterns of variation diverge or converge and to what extent catalysts for change are shared in time and space. Chapters look at different factors in grammatical variation at both the macro and micro level, investigating specific linguistic and grammatical features but also at wider phenomena in contact linguistics, social patterns, social networks, and media-based corpora. Chapters progress from the local to the global, all with an eye towards using the latest methodological approaches from corpus linguistics to shed light on the affordances of data-informed methods to study grammatical change and the possibilities for future research. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, and World Englishes.

This book sheds new light on the nature of gerunds in English, utilizing data from very large electronic corpora in order to compare pairs of patterns viewed as constructions. It serves as a contribution to the study of complementation, an under-researched area of investigation which bridges observations at the intersection of lexico-grammar, syntax and semantics. As a result, the reader develops their understanding of the meaning and use of each pattern within the system of English predicate complementation as it has evolved in recent times. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of English linguistics, especially English grammar.