This is an important book, for both the subject it treats and the manner in which it treats that subject. The subject is grammatical variation between British and American English, and the manner of treatment is typically a detailed statistical analysis of particular grammatical points.

The vocabulary, pronunciation, and orthography of English on the two sides of the Atlantic have been covered in considerable detail. Variations in grammar have been treated less expansively, so this collection of studies is most welcome. Incidentally, variations in style have received even more limited attention, style being the choices made among options in particular registers or contexts. Because stylistic variation is distinctive between the national varieties, one hopes that eventually it will receive the same intensity of exploration that grammatical variation does in this volume.

The book begins with an introductory chapter by the two editors that gives an overview of the field and the volume. That chapter is followed by nineteen others authored by eighteen contributors. Because of the large amount of material covered in this volume and the detail of some of the analysis, it is not feasible to give an adequate chapter summary. The following remarks are therefore only thumbnail sketches of the chapters to suggest the extent and richness of the coverage. Some general comments are reserved for the end of the review.

Chapter 1, ‘Colonial lag, colonial innovation or simply language change?’ by Marianne Hundt, University of Zurich, reconsiders the proposition that American English is more conservative than British English. That is a special case of the general proposition that the language of settlements from a motherland tend to be more resistant to change than the language in the motherland itself. Neither the general proposition nor its special application to American vis-à-vis British English seems capable of proof as a principle. In some features, American is more conservative than British, and in others it is more innovative. No obvious method exists for totaling up the ways in which these two, or any two, varieties of language differ with respect to innovation or for assigning weights to the degrees of conservation and innovation. Therefore, the principle of colonial lag seems beyond the realm of proof. It is consequently an uninteresting matter from the standpoint of scholarship.

Hundt cites a number of features that have been advanced as relevant to the question, and they are interesting in themselves. But, as the two varieties are constantly influencing each other, both innovative and conservative features can (and have been) borrowed back and forth; that complicates any effort to arrive at an overall assessment. Hundt concludes in part that ‘the dichotomy “conservative vs. innovative” turns out to be too simplistic for a description of the relation of American and British English. I therefore suggest that we (should) give up the term “colonial lag” altogether and simply refer to different patterns of language change’ (p. 34).

Chapter 2, ‘Compound verbs’ by Peter Erdmann, Technical University of Berlin, considers combinations such as to barhop, hand-feed and sweet-talk, which are used in both varieties. He also considers distinctively American compounds such as to gumshoe ‘to work as a detective or to move about stealthily’ and distinctively British compounds such as to blackleg ‘to continue working when one's fellow workers are on strike’. Erdmann concludes:

Chapter 3, ‘The formation of the preterite and the past participle’ by Magnus Levin, Växjö University, studies the occurrence of irregular and regular forms in such verbs as burn/burnt/burned, leap/leapt/leaped and spoil/spoilt/spoiled. British tends to favor the irregular forms; American, the regular ones. However, some irregular forms, such as dwelt and knelt, are frequent in written texts of both varieties. It is perhaps noteworthy that those two verbs are probably less common than the others and may have poetic or ritual associations.

Chapter 4, ‘Synthetic and analytic comparatives’ by Britta Mondorf, University of Mainz, compares the two varieties in their preference with respect to forms like taller versus more tall and happier versus more happy. Mondorf concludes that there are two major differences. One is that American uses a higher share of the second, analytic type than British does. The other is more surprising, namely that British uses more comparative forms of either kind than American does. She explains both differences as resulting from an American proclivity for ‘avoiding cognitively complex structures, a property it shares with informal styles’.

Chapter 5, ‘Phonology and grammar’ by Julia Schlüter, University of Bamberg, looks at the effect of the principle of rhythmic alteration on the choice of grammatical alternatives. The principle holds that a tendency exists to alternate stressed and unstressed syllables so as to promote smooth rhythm. Grammatical alternatives that might be affected by this principle include the choice between forms such as lit and lighted in particular phonological contexts and the position of quite in expressions such as ‘a quíte néw’ versus ‘quíte a néw’ and ‘a quíte remárkable’ versus ‘quíte a remárkable’. Schlüter concludes that the effect of rhythmic alteration on the choice of grammatical alternatives is clear, but that ‘it is impossible to argue that either BrE or AmE is more sensitive to rhythmic alternation’ because their responses differ.

Chapter 6, ‘Prepositions and postpositions’ by Eva Berlage, University of Paderborn, concerns the options in expressions like ‘including/excepting/aside from/apart from these matters’ and ‘These matters included/excepted/aside/apart’. Berlage indicates that, in both British and American, the choice of position for the italicized forms (which are of various parts of speech) before or after the associated noun phrase has to do with the length and complexity of the noun phrase.

Chapter 7, ‘Argument structure’ by David Denison, University of Manchester, considers a single construction with an odd and interesting, apparently recent, reversal of meaning. The construction is ‘substitute something new for something old’, which is the semantic equivalent of ‘replace something old with something new’. However, for some speakers, the construction has undergone a reversal of the complement terms to ‘substitute something old for something new’, while still keeping the original sense, i.e. ‘replace something old with something new’. Although Denison cites some American use, the reversal is primarily British and may derive from soccer reportage.

Chapter 8, ‘Reflexive structures’ by Günter Rohdenburg, University of Paderborn, reports that overt reflexive structures like ‘I washed myself’ have been continuously losing ground to intransitive use: ‘I washed’. That change is stronger in American English, which also tends to avoid the use of reflexive verbs that cannot be used intransitively: ‘I absented myself’ but *‘I absented’.

Chapter 9, ‘Noun phrase modification’ by Douglas Biber, Jack Grieve and Gina Iberri-Shea, all Northern Arizona University, is a description of the structure of such modification and documents a historical change favoring phrases rather than clauses as modifiers, stronger in American than in British.

Chapter 10, ‘Nominal complements’ by Günter Rohdenburg, examines a large number of constructions in which a verb may have either a noun phrase or a prepositional phrase as a complement: ‘protest (against) the invasion’, ‘resign (from) the post’ and similar but more complex constructions. In most cases, American tends to favor the option without a preposition.

Chapter 11, ‘Non-finite complements’ by Uwe Vosberg, University of Kiel, considers constructions of the type ‘cannot stand to see / seeing’, ‘have no business to ask / asking’, etc. National preference varies by the particular construction.

Chapter 12, ‘The present perfect and the preterite’ by Johan Elsness, University of Oslo, considers the tense option in expressions like ‘I saw / have seen him recently’. Elsness concludes that use of the present perfect has continuously declined in English generally, and notably so in American, as compared with Continental languages like French and German. It might be parenthetically observed that Old English was far more restrained in its use of perfect forms than were later stages of the language; so one might see the retreat from the perfect as a reassertion of the root system of the language.

Chapter 13, ‘The revived subjunctive’ by Göran Kjellmer, University of Gothenburg, offers possible explanations of a revived use of the subjunctive, especially in American. It was common in earlier discussions of the subjunctive to call it a dying form. In the light of those earlier discussions, the apparent revival of the mood, which Kjellmer calls ‘nothing less than remarkable’, does require explanation; and what he proposes deserves careful consideration. But it might be that the subjunctive's resurrection from near death is an illusion and that the mood never ceased to be used in certain varieties of the language but became unfashionable in those varieties that were most thoroughly documented. This is only speculation but may be worth investigation.

Chapter 14, ‘The mandative subjunctive’ by William J. Crawford, Northern Arizona University, is a detailed study of its subject, a specific use of the subjunctive, which is of major importance. Crawford focuses on the trigger ‘mandates’, i.e. the verbs, nouns, and adjectives that are followed by a that-clause containing a subjunctive verb, such as ‘They suggested that he be reprimanded’. A related construction in need of investigation is the innovative British mandative indicative, as in ‘They suggested that he was reprimanded’, which is not a report of fact but a report of a proposal (Algeo Reference Algeo and Blank1992).

Chapter 15, ‘The conditional subjunctive’ by Julia Schlüter, University of Bamberg, is a detailed analysis of a related construction with similar mood options (subjunctive, modal auxiliary, indicative), as in ‘on condition that he do / would do / does or did so’. The ‘on condition that’ construction, with both conditional and mandative features, is complex in both history and variety options.

Chapter 16, ‘Tag questions’ by D. J. Allerton, University of Basle, is a detailed description of the complex English system of tag questions, identifying British−American differences. American use prefers pro-verb do rather than have in tags: ‘She has a chance, doesn't she?’ Recent American favors invariant tags: ‘She has a chance, right?’ Various forms of British use the invariant tags innit? or yeah? They also use tags in a variety of pragmatic ways from the friendly to the aggressive. And they use them after yes−no questions: ‘Does he speak Spanish, does he?’

Chapter 17, ‘The pragmatics of adverbs’ by Karin Aijmer, University of Gothenburg, analyzes various uses of sure and surely in the sense ‘certainly’ in British and American. Sample instances are British ‘Sure, sir, you have slept since I saw you’ and American ‘It sure was a cold night’.

Chapter 18, ‘How different are American and British English grammar? And how are they different?’ by Gunnel Tottie, University of Zurich, differs from all the preceding chapters in that it focuses, not on a particular grammatical construction, but on the extent of differences between the two national varieties. Those differences are often in frequency rather than form. Thus British uses try and or try to and tag questions more than American does. So the question is what American does instead. In constructions like ‘He bought the same car as/that/Ø she did’, British prefers the first two options and American the third zero option.

Tottie's discussion sticks to the two questions in her title. She writes, ‘I have deliberately refrained from discussing reasons for differences between American and British grammar’ (p. 362). That restraint is refreshing because such reasons may be unconvincing or speculative. In this volume, proposed explanations are sometimes phrased in terms of cognitive complexity or informality. The problem with such explanations is that they are subjective and may stand for, or be interpreted as, value judgments. Tottie is wise to avoid speculation; she does, however, explicitly answer her title questions. And her answers are ‘More different than we used to think’ and ‘In more ways than we can anticipate’.

Chapter 19, ‘New departures’, by the two editors, Günter Rohdenburg and Julia Schlüter, is also not limited to a particular feature but seeks to foster the sort of work that the earlier chapters of the book embody. Rohdenburg and Schlüter's central theme is that ‘the most important lesson to be drawn from the preceding studies is the one expressed by Gunnel Tottie . . . “the more delicate our analysis, the more differences we find”’. At sixty pages, by far the longest in the book, this chapter identifies some other aspects of British−American grammatical difference that await detailed investigation. They are too many to list here, but anyone looking for a subject to dig into would be well advised to give this chapter a close reading. The grammatical categories dealt with are adverbs, prepositions, noun phrases, predicates and sentence structure.

As the chapters in this book generally end with a conclusion, it is perhaps appropriate for this review to do so as well. As the reviewer's high opinion of the value of the book should be abundantly clear from the body of the review, nothing more along that line is needed here. Instead, a few caveats are indulged in.

The first caveat is suggested by the title and general subject of the book, which is a comparison of two national varieties. The term ‘national variety’ is a convenient fiction. Alfred Korzybski, the Polish-American formulator of the theory of general semantics, used to insist that, pace Plato, no real tree actually exists. What exist are tree₁ (in my front garden), tree₂ (a bit down the road), and so on. And even tree₁ does not actually exist but instead tree_{1-on 1 June 2009 at 10.34.52 am} and so on. Both Heraclitus and the Buddha taught us that everything flows and nothing stands still. We cannot step into the same river twice, or even once because it changes as we step. Everything we think of as stable is just the result of abstraction.

With respect to languages, what actually exist are individual linguistic performance actions. Everything else, from idiolects through dialects to various languages and ultimately language itself, is an abstraction. And the higher we go, the more abstract the ‘object’ is. So when we describe British or American English, we are actually describing a fairly limited set of linguistic actions that we have taken as representative of the higher abstraction. If we take a different set of actions to focus on, we will get different results. An inspection of the particular corpuses used for the studies in this book makes it clear that none of them is fully representative of the two abstract national varieties, nor could they be.

A second caveat concerns corpus-based studies and statistical interpretations. Language corpuses and statistics are both of great value and should be used. But two things need to be kept in mind. One is that human intuition also has value. That fact is highlighted by recent studies of the military use of droids in the Middle East. It turns out that the most sophisticated automata are slower and less reliable than the human eye and mind. The other is attributed to Benjamin Disraeli, namely that there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics. The value of statistics depends on what they are based on, how they are compiled, and how they are interpreted. This book depends heavily on corpuses and statistics; and it would be of significantly less value without that dependence. But corpuses are not infallible scripture, and statistical interpretations are not ex cathedra bulls.

A third caveat is that the distinction between lexis and grammar is not watertight. A trivial example is that twice is a lexical item and two times is a grammatical construction, but they mean the same thing. A more relevant example is that many British−American grammatical differences are not matters of general syntactic rules but are linked to particular lexical items. That fact is abundantly clear from this book.

Finally, this is a valuable book. But value, like beauty, is the response of a perceiver. So the questions are: To whom will this book appeal? For whom was it written? Some books are popular in intention. They are directed to nonspecialist readers interested in the subject. Other books are intended as source material for popularizers or textbook writers, whose concern is effective communication and who themselves have only a moderate command of a subject's technical expertise. And yet other books are written by specialists for other specialists, necessarily a limited readership. These three types of books – and others as well – have their uses and appropriate readerships. All are needed. The book reviewed here, being authored by eighteen writers, varies in its parts, certainly. But as a whole, it has been written by specialists for other specialists to read.