An accessible, up-to-date account of the major changes in English syntax since its beginnings up to the present day.

Olga Fischer is Professor of Germanic Linguistics at the Universiteit van Amsterdam. She is co-author of The Syntax of Early English (Cambridge, 2000), with Wim van der Wurff, Ans van Kemenade and Willem Koopman. She is also the author of Morphosyntactic Change: Functional and Formal Perspectives (2007) and a contributor to the Cambridge History of the English Language (Cambridge, 1992).

1. Introduction; 2. Data and data handling; 3. Theoretical models and morpho-syntactic change; 4. The role of contact in syntactic change in English; 5. The noun phrase; 6. The verb phrase; 7. Clausal constituents; 8. Subordinate clauses; 9. Word order; 10. References; Index.