'This book is a welcome addition to Cambridge University Press's excellent Studies in English Language series. For John Flowerdew it represents the culmination of work on a set of nouns that he first identified and named in 1994 and on which, often with Ph.D. students and other research associates, he has been working ever since.' Susan Hunston, English Language and Linguistics
1. Introduction; 2. Grammatical features of signalling nouns; 3. Semantic features; 4. Discourse features; 5. Criteria for determining what constitutes a signalling noun in this study; 6. Corpus, methodology, annotation system, and reporting of the data; 7. Set of examples; 8. Overview of signalling noun distributions in the corpus; 9. Overview of semantic categories; 10. Overview of lexicogrammatical and discourse pattern frequencies; 11. Conclusion; References; Appendix A. The overall structure of the corpus; Appendix B. List of texts that make up the corpus; Appendix C. Lemmatised SNs in descending order according to normalised frequency; Appendix D. Non-lemmatised SNs in descending order according to normalised frequency; Appendix E. Lemmatised SNs in alphabetical order; Appendix F. Non-lemmatised SNs in alphabetical order; Appendix G. Frequency of SNs in different semantic categories.