This book is for teachers and students of English, native and non-native, and all those who take an interest in change and variation in the language. The core grammar of the language has been undergoing major changes in recent times, sometimes summed up under the label of the Great Complement Shift, and this book provides fresh perspectives on major aspects of the Shift.
 
The author documents changes and innovative trends in recent English grammar, taking both British and American English into account, drawing on a unique combination of large electronic corpora, including the Bank of English Corpus, the TIME Corpus, and the BNC. He adopts the method of in-depth case studies of core patterns in the language, with a focus on infinitive and –ing clauses, and the analysis of the patterns as constructions, combining a form with a meaning, provides fresh insights into the explanatory principles to account for change and variation in recent British and American English.