Marianne Hundt is Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Heidelberg. She has been involved in the compilation and annotation of several corpora. Her research interests range from the corpus-based description of modern English grammar, ongoing change, regional and diachronic variation in standard and regional Englishes world-wide to grammaticalisation in Late Modern English. She has published various articles on these topics, one monograph (New Zealand English Grammar – Fact or Fiction, 1998) and edited two volumes of corpus-related work.

• List of tables and figuresPrefaceChapter 1: IntroductionChapter 2: Defining the object of studyChapter 3: Previous studiesChapter 4: Theoretical backgroundChapter 5: The mediopassive in Present Day EnglishChapter 6: The history of mediopassivesChapter 7: ConclusionReferencesAppendix 1: Primary materialAppendix 2: Sample pages of Sears & Roebucks cataloguesAppendix 3: Additional tables and figuresIndex

”As for the productiveness of the mediopassive construction, the author shows impressively how this phenomenon has increased over the last century in the catalogues. That is, the mediopassive construction is very productive in modern advertising, where inherent properties of the goods are explained. In all, the book is a diligent study which offers many new insights and a wealth of examples which demonstrate the gradient character of grammatical categories. Hundt shows that, even at our advanced stage of computerization, semantic and pragmatic studies in corpus linguistics still need an attentive linguist at the (wo)man-machine interface” in: ICAME Journal 32, April 2008