Distinctions are all-important to grammatical description. Terms and concepts cannot be defined without them. Yet, linguists may disagree on which distinctions to make, where, and on which grounds. A grammarian may have a tendency to either split categories or lump them together, and may prefer to draw either sharp or blurred dividing lines between forms, usage types, or areas of study.

This volume sheds new light on several topics in English grammar by introducing, redrawing or questioning boundaries between grammatical classes, between synchrony and diachrony, and between semantics and pragmatics. It is dedicated to Renaat Declerck, emeritus professor of English linguistics who retired from Belgium’s University of Leuven in 2009. While Declerck’s main contributions lie in his detailed study of the English tense system, he has dissected a vast range of grammatical phenomena in English. The first part of the book discusses distinctions in the grammar of the English verb phrase, dealing with tense, modality, and -ing forms and nominalisations. The second part is devoted to distinctions in the grammar of the sentence and utterance in English, exploring issues related to word order and information structure, reasoning, and dialogic interaction.

Insightfully written by European and Japanese scholars in honour of Renaat Declerck’s careful descriptive approach and many achievements, the fifteen original papers collected in this book will reward anyone studying or describing the grammar of English.