Complementation of antagonistic verbs like protest and appeal has been studied from both a diachronic and a World Englishes perspective, making use of both corpus data and experimentation. The verb protest, in particular, is of interest from a perspective of variation across World Englishes and recent change as it is the only antagonistic verb exhibiting a clear trend of divergent development in American English from prepositional to bare NP complementation. Moreover, preliminary corpus evidence suggests that usage in British English newswriting has recently converged on the American model. While there is some indication that New Zealand English may have been ahead of British English in this convergence on the American model, evidence on Australian English was lacking. The present paper fills this gap in previous research on changing complementation patterns in World Englishes, using corpus evidence on recent change in Australian English and related varieties, applying state-of-the-art statistical modelling.

This chapter starts out from the serendipitous observation of patterns where look forward to is complemented not by a verbal -ing form (as would be expected by standard grammars) but by a plain infinitive, as in I’m looking forward to meet you. It investigates the spread and frequency of this construction in a wide range of corpora, some of which also allow a diachronic comparison, and considers several potentially conditioning factors. Grammatically, this pattern can be explained as a case of reanalysis in the process of structural transmission, showcasing structural simplification that may characterise second-language acquisition. The form to, the final element in the phrasal-prepositional verb under discussion, is reinterpreted as a homonymic but functionally different form, the to infinitive marker. The results clearly support the hypothesis that the ’look forward to + plain infinitive’ pattern constitutes more than mere performance errors and appears to represent an ’embryonic’ manifestation of an incipient change, with a strong focus in Asian Englishes, and possibly with Indian English as an epicentre, although the trend may have been reversed recently in formal registers.