Abstract
The transitive into ‐ing pattern, as in These facts lure us into believing that …, has come to be used in English in sometimes unexpected and innovative ways, as has been noted in earlier corpus‐based work on the pattern. The present study examines the innovative use of the pattern in three large standard newspaper corpora that form part of the Bank of English Corpus: the United States News, SUNNOW and Times Corpora. Note is taken of the recently formulated hypothesis that grammatical change in current English is led by American English, and the three newspaper corpora are used to examine this hypothesis. It is suggested that in this particular case of lexico‐grammatical variation in the language, it is in fact British English that is in the vanguard of innovation. This result is confirmed when a semantically defined subset of innovative matrix verbs are investigated in spoken British and American English. A comparison of the SUNNOW and Times corpora also makes it possible to draw conclusions on innovation and creativity in two types of British newspapers, one popular and the other high brow.
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