Written by one of Britain's most distinguished linguists, this book is concerned with the phenomenon of variance in English grammar and vocabulary across regional, social, stylistic and temporal space.

Foreword1. Variance in English: the global context2. Variance and the concept of good usage3. Language varieties and standard language4. Language spread and language variation5. Linguistic variance: nature and art6. Orwell and language engineering 7. Exploring the English genitive: a tribute to Jespersen8. A case study of multiple meaning9. Non-finite clauses in Chaucer10. On having a look in a corpus11. The Survey of English Usage and adverbial realisations12. Grammatical data by elicitation13. A problem of modality14. Acceptability experiments in spoken English15. A tough object to trace16. Activating latent contrasts17. Contrasts in lexical semantics18. Aspect and variant inflexion19. Taking a deep smell: sex and a single verbReferencesIndex