Contents; Figures; Tables; Notes on contributors; Preface; 1 Introduction; The background to this book; Contents of the volume; Chapter 2. Bas Aarts, Joanne Close and Sean Wallis (University College London and Chester), 'Choices over time: methodological issues in investigating current change'; Chapter 3. Mark Davies (Brigham Young), 'Recent shifts with three nonfinite verbal complements in English: data from the 100-million-word Time corpus (1920s-2000s)'; Chapter 4. Nicholas Smith and Geoffrey Leech (Salford and Lancaster), 'Verb structures in twentieth-century British English' Chapter 5. Douglas Biber and Bethany Gray (Northern Arizona), 'Nominalizing the verb phrase in academic science writing'Chapter 6. Sali A. Tagliamonte (Toronto), 'The verb phrase in contemporary Canadian English'; Chapter 7. Manfred Krug and Ole Schützler (Bamberg), 'Recent change and grammaticalization'; Chapter 8. Magnus Levin (Växjö), 'The progressive verb in modern American English'; Chapter 9. Meike Pfaff, Alexander Bergs and Thomas Hoffmann (Osnabrück), 'I was just reading this article - on the expression of recentness and the English past progressive' Chapter 10. Marcus Callies (Bremen), 'Bare infinitival complements in Present-Day English'Chapter 11. José Ramón Varela Pérez (Santiago de Compostela), 'Operator and negative contraction in spoken British English: a change in progress'; Chapter 12. Gunther Kaltenböck (Vienna), 'The development of comment clauses'; Chapter 13. Jill Bowie, Sean Wallis and Bas Aarts (University College London), 'The perfect in spoken British English'; Chapter 14. Christopher Williams (Foggia) 'Changes in the verb phrase in legislative language in English' Chapter 15. Stig Johansson (Oslo) 'Modals and semi-modals of obligation in American English: some aspects of developments from 1990 until the present day'2 Choices over time: methodological issues in investigating current change; 2.1 Introduction; 2.2 The Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day Spoken English; 2.3 Focusing on true alternation: the progressive; 2.3.1 Changes in frequency per million words; 2.3.2 Changes in frequency as a percentage of the total number of VPs; 2.3.3 Changes in one choice out of a set of alternants; 2.4 A case study: the alternation shall versus will; 2.4.1 Background 2.4.2 Mair and Leechs work on written English2.4.3 Experimenting with shall/will alternants in DCPSE; 2.4.4 Examining the contracted form ll; 2.4.5 Plotting trends over time; 2.4.6 Modal meaning; 2.4.7 be going to versus the modals; 2.5 Conclusions; Appendix 1: Employing statistical tests and handling small, skewed samples; Appendix 2: Measures of change; Chapter 3: Recent shifts with three nonfinite verbal complements in English: data from the 100-million-word Time corpus (1920s-2000s); 3.1 Introduction; 3.2 Using text archives: the Time Magazine Corpus of American English 3.3 Three shifts in verbal complementation during the 1900s | 
