Introduction

This chapter surveys a series of British–American contrasts in the area of nominal (and prepositional forms of) complementation against the background of (potentially) long-term and general tendencies. The major perspective adopted resembles that pursued in McWhorter (2002), who in turn was inspired by Hawkins (1986). Considering a set of grammatical features characteristic of Common Germanic, McWhorter demonstrates that in the course of its history English has become strikingly less formally marked than any of its Germanic sister languages. It will be argued here that with few though important exceptions in a circumscribed area, a similar contrast has evolved between BrE and AmE. Accordingly, we shall concentrate on grammatical variation phenomena where the relevant alternatives lend themselves to being classed as more or less explicit. It will be shown that with most types of constructions it is AmE that favours the formally less explicit or simpler option over its more complex variant. In this respect, the present study complements the survey of reflexives in Chapter 8.

In addition, there are two further goals pursued in this chapter. We shall attempt – at least in some cases – to shed some light on the earlier history of the relevant contrasts and to identify some major contextual constraints on the constructions analysed.