Publishers are understandably partial to short, catchy titles; and readers must love them too: just a few words, a handful of syllables capable of giving you an overview of what to expect in the tome you are about to buy. In the case of the book under discussion here, there is no doubt that the title may well create great expectations: are we going to learn more about uses of the subjunctive, or the present perfect, or the progressive mode? What about modality? And what about social and geographical variation in syntactic patterns? These, however, are only some of the research questions that can be asked, and indeed the chapters in the book often ask rather different ones on account of the agenda that underpins the project from which they derive. In this respect, it should be pointed out that the book derives from an invitational workshop of the same title held at the University of Zurich in 2012, and as many as nine of the seventeen chapters featured in the book were first presented and discussed there. The workshop saw the participation of some of the leading scholars in the field and – given its structure – homogeneity in methodological approaches was certainly crucial. This homogeneity is reflected in the book, in which quantitative investigations take centre stage and often feature very prominently.

The book is carefully edited and comprises an author and a subject index, in addition to lists of figures, tables, data sources and contributors; references are not provided at the end of individual chapters, but are listed at the end. This does save space and avoids redundancies, but the inevitable mismatch between the list of references and the name index causes some authors to feature in the former, but not in the latter, so that readers are at a loss to find out where those specific references actually occur in the book. The introduction provides a general overview of the topics under discussion and presents the contributions, stressing their relevance for the research questions at hand. Within the chapters themselves, however, cross-references are somewhat infrequent and references to the sources from which the examples are taken may vary: for instance, in one chapter we may find: ‘(COCA, 2006, FIC)’, while in another there is ‘(COCA, CNN_King 1999)’ and in another ‘(2010 COCA: MAG)’. These, however, are minor details. What would perhaps have been more helpful is an indication of the text types from which the ARCHER examples are taken, instead of simply giving the code number, as this is opaque to non-ARCHER users, and – as Biber & Gray (Reference Biber and Gray2013) aptly point out – when texts cater for different audiences their register may be affected in significant ways.

The seventeen chapters making up the book are grouped into seven parts, each of which comprises a varying number of papers; perhaps predictably, the largest number of contributions (five) features in the first section (‘Changes in the VP’), with papers by Lieselotte Anderwald (‘The decline of the be-perfect, linguistic relativity, and grammar writing in the nineteenth century’), Anita Auer (‘Let's not, let's don’t and don't let's in British and American English’), Christian Mair (‘Do we got a difference? Divergent developments of semi-auxiliary (have) got (to) in British and American English’), Nadja Nesselhauf (‘From contraction to construction? The recent life of ’ll’) and Marianne Hundt (‘Books that sell – mediopassives and the modification “constraint”’).

All the other parts are much slimmer, to the point of including just one chapter in the case of parts VI (‘Text-type related change’ [sic]) and VII (‘Language contact and syntactic change’), where we find the contributions by Erik Smitterberg (‘Syntactic stability and change in nineteenth-century newspaper language’) and by Kevin McCafferty (‘“[W]ell are you not got over thinking about going to Ireland yet”: the be-perfect in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Irish English’).

Part IV, on category change, comprises three chapters: one by Eva Berlage (‘Opposite developments in composite predicate constructions: the case of take advantage of and make use of’), one by Hendrik De Smet (‘Constrained confusion: the gerund/participle distinction in Late Modern English’) and one by Claudia Claridge and Merja Kytö (‘“You are a bit of a sneak”: exploring a degree modifier in the Old Bailey Corpus’).

Parts II (‘Changes in the NP’), III (‘Changes in complementation patterns’) and V (‘The syntax–pragmatics interface’) include two chapters each. In part II these are authored by Tine Breban (‘Beyond mere syntactic change: a micro-analytical study of various and numerous’) and by Benedikt Szmrecsanyi, Anette Rosenbach, Joan Bresnan and Christoph Wolk (‘Culturally conditioned [sic] language change? A multivariate analysis of genitive constructions in ARCHER’).

In part III the authors are Günther Rohdenburg (‘On the changing status of that-clauses’) and a group of researchers comprising Hubert Cuyckens, Frauke D’Hoedt and Benedikt Szmrecsanyi (‘Variability in verb complementation in Late Modern English: finite vs. non-finite patterns’).

Finally, part V includes papers by Laurel J. Brinton (‘If you choose / like / prefer / want / wish: the origin of metalinguistic and politeness functions’) and by María José López-Couso and Belén Méndez-Naya (‘Epistemic parentheticals with seem: Late Modern English in focus’).

The relative lack of quantitative balance between parts is perhaps understandable: some phenomena, like the verb phrase, are more likely to interest the envisaged readership; but the importance of language contact in language change and text-type variation and change have also been the object of important investigations: see, for instance, the papers in Hickey (Reference Hickey2003) and, on news discourse, the growing number of publications listed at www.chinednews.com/publications/. Therefore, providing just one contribution per topic seems a bit limiting; one cannot help wondering whether chapters could not have been grouped differently on the basis of other criteria, if adding a couple of chapters was not possible.

Summarizing all the chapters would require much more space than is available here, and perhaps many titles are self-explanatory enough to make summaries of little interest. What may be of greater interest is an overview of the strong points characterizing the book and – admittedly – a few weaknesses. The book itself as a finished product is a remarkable achievement: all the topics under discussion are intrinsically worthy of in-depth investigation, and some of them build on earlier findings concerning similar issues, or rely on corpora already used in previous studies, in order to provide new perspectives on specific themes. This is the case, for instance, with McCafferty's paper on Irish English in Late Modern times, a variety about which a considerable body of evidence is becoming available thanks to the studies conducted by McCafferty himself and Carolina Amador-Moreno on the Corpus of Irish English Correspondence, CORIECOR – see, for instance, McCafferty & Amador-Moreno (Reference McCafferty and Amador-Moreno2014).

However, some aspects relating to the views obviously underpinning the enterprise may be worth discussing. Among these, one of the questions that arise as soon as the table of contents is skimmed concerns the use of ‘British English’; it is of course a shorthand label, but perhaps nowadays, when increasing attention is being paid to social and geographical variation even in diachronic studies, it would be useful to problematize it a little, as at no time in its history has English been the monolithic entity this label would pretend it was or actually is. The chapters aiming to compare ‘British and American English’ actually deal with the latter and ‘Southern English’ English, as Northern, Welsh, Canadian, or indeed other varieties, are never discussed: only Scots and Scottish English are referred to in McCafferty's chapter on Irish English.

Nor are manuscript sources normally taken into consideration: apart from the chapters in which the letters included in ARCHER are discussed, and the chapter by McCafferty, which relies on correspondence, investigations deal with printed and/or mediated sources, such as the one by Claridge & Kytö, which analyses the proceedings of the Old Bailey and in which spoken language is of course represented in the clerks’ transcriptions. This seems odd in the light of the growing interest in so-called ‘ego documents’, and the fact that corpora based on them are slowly becoming available – see Auer, Schreier & Watts (Reference Auer, Schreier and Watts2015) and the studies in Dossena (Reference Dossena2015). In addition, the Corpus of Early English Correspondence has been extended to include the eighteenth century (see www.helsinki.fi/varieng/CoRD/corpora/CEEC/ceece.html) and the Salamanca Corpus (see www.thesalamancacorpus.com/) is a treasure trove of texts which discuss and/or attempt to imitate spoken language in local varieties of Southern English. Again, we would be dealing with mediated sources, but at least a broader range of varieties could be considered.

Inevitably, this choice of sources has an impact on the studies carried out in the volume; as Anderwald is ready to admit, evidence may be inconclusive, as even large corpora can be small for certain research questions, depending on their structure. As a result, these evaluations give rise to another question: that is, whether greater attention ought not to be given to corpus compilation before quantitative investigations are attempted, and what place qualitative analyses ought to have in research (see Kohnen Reference Kohnen, Fitzmaurice and Taavitsainen2007). Multi-million-word corpora may give the impression they are both representative and reliable, but if the text types they include are only those that can be collected quickly and rather effortlessly because they derive from edited and printed sources, they still offer a partial view, no matter how impressive their size may be, because printed language is only a fraction of what is actually used in real-life exchanges; in addition, editorial interventions may skew data.

As for the book's contents, the editor opens her introduction with the acknowledgement that interest in Late Modern English has grown considerably over the last fifteen years, but stresses that morphological and syntactic change is still underinvestigated. This is certainly true, and makes the book all the more valuable. Still, it would have been interesting to see how the findings in these chapters relate to the studies carried out in relation to what was ‘codified’ at the time (see Tieken-Boon van Ostade Reference Tieken-Boon van Ostade2008), such as we see in Anderwald's and – to a lesser extent – in Auer's chapters. In this respect, a broader range of primary sources could perhaps have been taken into consideration, and it is somewhat disappointing to see that these are not listed separately in the references, so that a better idea may be gained about the extent to which authors relied on modern corpora or individual commentators’ sources.

As the book deals with ‘change’, considerable attention is paid to present-day usage, so that older and current patterns can be contrasted and compared. However, this is another aspect in relation to which the title of the book may prove misleading. The chapters do not offer an overview of ‘Late Modern English syntax’ – i.e. of usage patterns in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Instead, they focus on the processes that have brought about shifts in usage, as shown by the long list of ‘-isations’ in the subject index: not just ‘grammaticalisation’ and ‘lexicalisation’, but also ‘actualisation, colloquialisation, conceptualisation, constructualisation, decategorialisation, delexicalisation, detransitivisation, fossilisation, and paradigmaticisation’. This bears witness to the book's interest in theoretical issues and its attempt to identify generally valid patterns in language change. On the other hand, this contrasts with the case studies offered in several chapters, such as those by Breban and Berlage, because the scope of case studies is limited by definition.

All the chapters address their research questions with clear links to previous studies within the same field of expertise. The chapters by Claridge & Kytö, Smitterberg and McCafferty focus on consistent corpora and, in this respect, provide an overview of usage in specific and well-defined contexts. In other cases, instead, the attitude to the definition of time-span, scope and text-type selection is rather flexible, to the point that some chapters, such as Mair's, Szmrecsanyi's and Rohdenburg's, range from the mid to late seventeenth century to the late twentieth and even early twenty-first century. The overall impression might be that currently available corpora were interrogated to find out what could be gleaned in relation to the research questions at hand, regardless of consistency with the book title, though this is in fact consistent with its aim to investigate processes that had an impact on language usage, at least (mostly) in printed texts.

The overall assessment of the volume is that of an important, theoretically engaging discussion of significant traits in the internal history of English syntax at a point in time that has often been overlooked, as if little had occurred, but which in fact laid the basis for current usage in very significant ways. It will be of interest to scholars and advanced students also specializing in methodological issues, as the quantitative investigations offered in the contributions help to shed more light on what best practices ought to be followed in studies of this kind.