Complementation in British and American English: Corpus-Based Studies on Prepositions and Complement Clauses

Complementation in British and American English applies a new empirical methodology to the study of the English language. It focuses on predicate complementation as a core area of English grammar on the basis of the Bank of English Corpus. At over 600 million words, this electronic corpus is the largest systematic corpus of the language in existence today. It offers a unique database of authentic usage for the study of the system of predicate complementation in British and American English. The authors make full use of this database, paying special attention to the language of newspapers and the spoken language in the two main regional varieties of English. The book illustrates a new and methodologically exciting direction in the study of the English language in the twenty-first century.