New in paperback. Hardcover was published in 2006. This is the most comprehensive survey ever published of the auxiliary verb construction. Drawing on a database of over 800 languages Dr. Anderson examines their morphosyntactic forms and semantic roles. He investigates and explains the historical changes leading to the cross-linguistic diversity of inflectional patterns, and presents his results within a new typological framework. He reveals much that is new about the language families of the world and makes an important contribution to the understanding of their nature and evolution.