John Flowerdew is a Professor in the Department of English at City University of Hong Kong. Richard W. Forest is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Central Michigan University.

• 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.

'Powerfully evidenced throughout with reference to a wide range of corpus sources, this is a very richly textured book of singular importance to our understanding of a core feature of discourse organisation, extending previous work with real insight and originality.' Ronald Carter, University of Nottingham