Speakers of British and American English display some striking differences in their use of grammar. In this detailed survey, John Algeo considers questions such as: Who lives on a street, and who lives in a street? Who takes a bath, and who has a bath? Who says Neither do I, and who says Nor do I? After 'thank you', who says Not at all and who says You're welcome? Whose team are on the ball, and whose team isn't? Containing extensive quotations from real-life English on both sides of the Atlantic, collected over the past twenty years, this is a clear and highly organized guide to the...

This is the first exhaustive investigation of gradience in syntax, conceived of as grammatical indeterminacy. It looks at gradience in English word classes, phrases, clauses and constructions, and examines how it may be defined and differentiated. Professor Aarts addresses the tension between linguistic concepts and the continuous phenomena they describe by testing and categorizing grammatical vagueness and indeterminacy. He considers to what extent gradience is a grammatical phenomenon or a by-product of imperfect linguistic description, and makes a series of linked proposals for its...

This volume features new and groundbreaking research on recent changes in the English verb phrase.