Verb-dependent non-finite complementation and, in particular, to- and bare-infinitive complement clauses have been the subject of extensive investigation and debate. The aim of this monograph is to contribute to the existing literature by modelling the variation in relation to a selection of verbs that govern to- and bare-infinite complements in the recent history of American and British English. Using methodologies provided by corpus linguistics and multivariate analyses, this book attempts to account for the forces that make certain verbs show a preference for either to-infinitive or bare-infinitive complementation from Middle English onwards, and to provide a comprehensive description of the factors that influence the choice of infinitival. Specifically, this monograph deals with morphological, syntactic and semantic/pragmatic variation between to- and bare-infinitive complementation in English, governed by, specifically, dare, need and help.

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.