There are few areas of English studies that have benefited so much from the advent of large electronic corpora as work on the system of English predicate complementation. Several major traditional grammarians, including H. Poutsma, based their work on large collections of authentic material, reaching a high standard of description and explanation in their monumental grammars. Large electronic corpora have reinvigorated the field in the last ten or fifteen years, in part because complements are dependent on heads and it tends to be easy to do searches in electronic corpora that are targeted at heads or at head and complement combinations. Thomas Egan's new book is an important contribution to this central area of English grammar. His data largely come from the British National Corpus, and he has selected infinitive and -ing clauses as the subject of his study. (With respect to the latter, the emphasis is on nonprepositional -ing clauses.) The general orientation of the book emphasizes cognitive grammar, but the book is written in an accessible way, which broadens its appeal beyond cognitive grammar. It contains a wealth of carefully presented arguments and observations, and a reviewer can only hope to comment on some aspects of this rich book.

Egan presents the syntactic foundation of his work in chapter 1. As he notes, his approach is different from most current work on sentential complementation involving infinitive and -ing clauses. It is customary nowadays to use a basic division of such complements into those involving control and those involving NP Movement, and this division has been finding its way from the theoretical literature into major scholarly grammars of English, most notably Huddleston and Pullum (Reference Huddleston and Pullum2002: 1193). Egan makes use of the distinction when defining the scope of his work, for he explicitly excludes subject to subject-raising constructions from his study (p. 12), even though these often involve to infinitives. However, while accepting the postulation of an understood subject in the subordinate clause of a sentence such as Love does not involve giving fancy parcels tied up with red bows (BNC, AYK 901), he rejects the notion in what would normally be considered standard control structures, as in I want to do it (p. 14). Instead, referring back to Matthews (Reference Matthews1981), he prefers to use Same-Subject (SS) and Different-Subject (DS) constructions as basic analytic concepts in his work. He does not spell it out, but the former constructions, it seems safe to assume in view of the exclusion of subject to subject-raising structures, correspond to what would be considered subject-control structures by others, at least to a significant extent. As for the latter, Egan initially illustrates them with sentences of the type of We can anticipate good things happening (BNC ADE 85) on p. 13, but they would also presumably include what would elsewhere be called object-control structures. However, Egan might have explicated the relation of his basic syntactic terms to the control versus NP Movement distinction, and to control structures, more explicitly, especially in the case of his DS constructions.

Another question that might have deserved at least a footnote in this connection would have been Egan's stance on the distinction made for instance in Huddleston and Pullum (Reference Huddleston and Pullum2002: 1204–5) between a verb of the type of catch in the pattern catch NP -ing, as in I caught him doing it, and a verb of the type of resent in the pattern resent NP -ing, as in I resented him doing it, for it is not clear whether the DS approach used in the book offers a suitable way of handling or representing the distinction. A further question worth asking here might have been whether this particular syntactic distinction has any semantic correlates.

While the present reviewer would have appreciated some more discussion of how Egan views the syntactic analysis of the constructions selected, it should be emphasized that the book has much to offer as regards the semantic analysis of infinitival and -ing clauses. The BNC furnishes Egan with a goldmine of data for his study from recent British English, and Egan makes excellent use of it. In all Egan has collected data on 310 matrix verbs. As he notes, the task of retrieving all relevant tokens of these verbs would have been an ‘insurmountable one’, and his decision to adopt one thousand as an upper limit of the tokens retrieved (pp. 15–16) for individual matrix verbs is an entirely reasonable one. (Where the total was lower than a thousand, he retrieved all tokens.)

Egan presents a large part of the discussion taking two points of view into account. Firstly, he proceeds from the point of view of the semantics of matrix verbs selecting SS or DS constructions, and, secondly, from the point of view of the ‘Tense-Aspect-Modality (TAM) relationship pertaining between the matrix verb and the situation in the complement clause’ (p. 19). The two perspectives are connected, but still conceptually distinct, and they bring structure to the discussion.

Regarding the first perspective, Egan employs nine notions, including ‘Perception’, ‘Mental Process’, ‘Attitude’ and ‘Causation’ (pp. 22–3, 26–7). As for the TAM perspective, Egan identifies six types of construction: ‘same-time’, as in I can taste blood running down the back of my throat (BNC A74 3123), ‘backward-looking’, as in Adam stopped walking and stared at her (BNC HA6 1924), ‘forward-looking’, as in He then requested Lucy and Jean to come from the kitchen (BNC HHB 4158), ‘general’, as in God's own country, as the Canadians delight to call it (BNC A0P 217), ‘judgement’, as in Theodora judged her to be in her early forties (BNC HA2 802) and ‘contemplation’, as in For a wild moment, she contemplated locking the door against him (BNC JYE 3415) (pp. 39–40).

With respect to the TAM groups, the reader wonders if the first three or four might appropriately form one dimension and, more broadly, whether the six types form a conceptually harmonious grouping of concepts. For instance, might ‘general’ perhaps stand in opposition to something like ‘specific’? (As a matter of interest, a contrast between ‘general’ and ‘specific’ comes up on p. 196.)

Egan gives brief definitions of the types when introducing them, and he then employs the concepts, in conjunction with those based on senses of matrix verbs, to characterize the infinitival and -ing clause patterns. For instance, in the case of the -ing form, Egan argues that it is found with four of the six TAM types. The two types that are excluded according to Egan are judgement and general constructions (p. 134). The latter claim might have warranted some further explication. Egan observes that it is a property of ‘general validity predications’ that they co-occur with ‘general validity adverbs’ of the type of generally, normally and usually. By contrast, according to him, such adverbs ‘do not occur in the BNC with quintessential same-time predicates like enjoy or dislike’ (p. 178). At the same time, Egan notes a sentence such as Macho man usually prefers talking to his own sex (BNC H83 939), but argues that such sentences are very rare in the BNC and that he therefore does not want to ‘posit a whole class of general validity predications encoded by the -ing complement form’ (p. 178). The reader may nevertheless wonder how he views the status of sentences such as Normally he enjoyed staying over at the firm's northern hospitality suite which was situated above their offices (BNC BP7 1910), retrieved by the present reviewer, and some further explication or a fuller listing of the class of adverbs in question might also have been of interest.

There are some details in the book that might have been explicated further, but Egan comes up with characterizations of the complement types that deserve the attention of grammarians of English. For instance, comparing bare infinitives with those with to, he argues convincingly that in the case of the former a ‘situation, viewed as a whole, is profiled as certain to occur in some specified domain’, while in the case of the latter a ‘situation, viewed as a whole, is profiled as the more/most likely of two or more alternatives in some specified domain’ (p. 142). He turns the different profiles to good use when he discusses matrix verbs that select both types of complement sentences, for instance, in the case of bid, which is found with both bid NP Verb and bid NP to Verb complements (pp. 202–3). He illustrates the former for instance with A gruff male voice bade them enter (BNC HH1 3841) and the latter with Therefore I bid you to put away anxious thoughts about food and drink to keep you alive, and clothes to cover your body (BNC ALH 480), and finds that the bid NP Verb pattern occurs with complement predicates expressing ‘mundane’ actions, such as entering a room, while the bid NP to Verb pattern goes with less mundane actions where there is more scope for alternative courses of action. The former then ‘profiles the complement situation as being more certain of realisation in the (near) projected future’ than the latter (p. 203). Indeed the latter half of the book is rich in comparisons of this type, involving different nonfinite types of complement selected by one and the same matrix verb, and the comparisons are well presented, with careful comments on the semantic contrasts of the pairs of complements in them. The use of authentic data adds to the interest of the comparisons.

Egan also devotes attention to the to -ing pattern in his book. While acknowledging that he covers that pattern less thoroughly than for instance bare and to infinitives in the book (p. 135), he points to some matrix verbs that may select both to infinitives and to -ing complements in current English, including profess, as in Interviews with people who profess to enjoy classical music turn up all sorts and conditions of appreciation (BNC CR7 452) and At the Plough Inn in Hereford, everyone professed to enjoying a pint of the local product (BNC K1T 3462) (p. 136). Comparing such sentences, Egan suggests that ‘the -ing form adds a connotation of duration and imperfectivity to the situation: i.e. it is represented as extending through time’ (p. 136). Regarding the semantics of the to of the profess to -ing pattern, Egan thinks that it is similar to the meaning of the to of the profess to infinitive pattern in that ‘it signals out the targeted alternative which the subject claims to be true’ (pp. 136–7). The present reviewer does not wish to take a stand on this particular formulation, but agrees with the general position that neither type of to should be dismissed as meaningless (see also Rudanko Reference Rudanko1989: 35–6 for some discussion of the infinitival to), and while some comment on the syntax of the two types of to (see Quirk et al. Reference Quirk1985: 1178 note a; Rudanko Reference Rudanko2006) would have been welcome in the present volume, Egan's discussion of the semantics of the to -ing pattern is of great interest in view of the central role of this pattern in the unfolding of recent changes in the system of English predicate complementation affecting matrix verbs, adjectives, and even nouns (see, for instance, Denison Reference Denison and Romaine1998: 266; Rudanko Reference Rudanko1998, Reference Rudanko2000: chapters 2, 3 and 4, 2006).

Egan also deserves credit for putting together a long appendix with information on individual verbs (pp. 318–404). In a further appendix he gives straightforward definitions of many technical terms used in the book (pp. 425–8).

Overall, Egan's book offers a wealth of semantic generalizations about central types of sentential complements in present-day English. He pays considerable attention to heads that select two different sentential complements, and the present reviewer often found Egan's comments on such pairs insightful. Egan is also fully sensitive to the evolving nature of the system of English predicate complementation, and the volume emphasizes the need for additional work in this area as new corpora become available. Those who take an interest in the system of English predicate complementation and in English grammar in general will want to read Egan's valuable study.