1. Acknowledgements; 2. List of contributors; 3. Interrogating corpora to describe grammatical patterns (by Davidse, Kristin); 4. Part 1. Patterns in the verb phrase; 5. Light verb constructions in the history of English (by Ronan, Patricia); 6. What happened to the English prefix, and could it stage a comeback? (by Diemer, Stefan); 7. The pattern to be a-hunting from Middle to Late Modern English: Towards extrapolating from Wright's English Dialect Dictionary (by Markus, Manfred); 8. The present perfect and the preterite in Late Modern and Contemporary English: A longitudinal look (by Elsness, Johan); 9. can and be able to in nineteenth-century Irish English: A case of 'imperfect learning'? (by Hattum, Marije van); 10. Part 2. Patterns in the noun phrase; 11. Syntactic constraints on the use of dual form intensifiers in Modern English (by Rohdenburg, Gunter); 12. Ma daddy wis dead chuffed: On the dialectal distribution of the intensifier dead in Contemporary English (by Blanco-Suarez, Zeltia); 13. The case of focus (by Maier, Georg); 14. Part 3. Patterns in complementation structures; 15. Null objects and sentential complements, with evidence from the Corpus of Historical American English (by Rudanko, Juhani); 16. A new angle on infinitival and of -ing complements of afraid, with evidence from the TIME Corpus (by Rudanko, Juhani); 17. Active and passive infinitive, ambiguity and non-canonical subject with ready (by Hoglund, Mikko); 18. Part 4. Patterns of clause combining; 19. The diffusion of English absolutes: A diachronic register study (by Pol, Nikki van de); 20. It-clefts in English L1 and L2 academic writing: The case of Norwegian learners (by Hasselgard, Hilde); 21. The speech functions of tag questions and their properties. A comparison of their distribution in COLT and LLC (by Kimps, Ditte); 22. Author index; 23. Subject index