Bas Aarts is Professor of English Linguistics and Director of the Survey of English Usage at University College London. Joanne Close is Lecturer in English Language in the English Department at the University of Chester. Geoffrey Leech is Professor Emeritus of English Linguistics at Lancaster University. Sean Wallis is a Senior Research Fellow in the Survey of English Usage at University College London.

• 1. Introduction Bas Aarts, Joanne Close, Geoffrey Leech and Sean Wallis; 2. Choices over time: methodological issues in investigating current change Bas Aarts, Joanne Close and Sean Wallis; 3. Recent shifts with three nonfinite verbal complements in English: data from the 100 million word TIME Corpus (1920s–2000s) Mark Davies; 4. Verb structures in twentieth-century British English Nicholas Smith and Geoffrey Leech; 5. Nominalizing the verb phrase in academic science writing Douglas Biber and Bethany Gray; 6. The verb phrase in contemporary Canadian English Sali Tagliamonte; 7. Recent change and grammaticalization Manfred Krug and Ole Schützler; 8. The progressive verb in modern American English Magnus Levin; 9. I was just reading this article - on the expression of recentness and the English past progressive Meike Pfaff, Alexander Bergs and Thomas Hoffmann; 10. Bare infinitival complements in present-day English Marcus Callies; 11. Operator and negative contraction in spoken British English: a change in progress José Ramón Varela Pérez; 12. The development of comment clauses Gunther Kaltenböck; 13. The perfect in spoken British English Jill Bowie, Sean Wallis and Bas Aarts; 14. Changes in the verb phrase in legislative language in English Christopher Williams; 15. Modals and semi-modals of obligation in American English: some aspects of developments from 1990 until the present day Stig Johansson.

'I highly recommend The Verb Phrase in English, both as a resource for students and scholars who want an overview of currently ongoing changes in the verbal domain, but also, and no less importantly, as an inspiration for further research … The editors and the authors are to be complimented on a volume that showcases the merits of the currently ongoing enterprise of investigating recent change in English on the basis of diachronic corpora. The book offers the reader an authoritative and well-organised overview of changes that pertain to verbal structures.' Martin Hilpert, Cercles