Clause patterns in modern British English. A corpus-based (quantitative) study

In the Department of Language and Speech (Corpus Linguistics Section) of Nijmegen University a research project is being carried out which aims to provide a survey of the frequency of occurrence and the distribution of a range of syntactic structures in Modern British English. The project makes use of the Nijmegen Corpus. This computerized corpus, comprising approximately 130,000 words, has undergone a detailed syntactic analysis and is available for exploratory studies. This article reports on findings with regard to the clause patterns encountered in the material.