In his review of Our Mutual Friend (1864–5), Henry James claimed the novel showed signs of its author’s ‘exhaustion’. In this chapter, Garrett Stewart shows, by way of contrast and rebuttal, the exhaustive catalogue of stylistic effects that Dickens energetically employs in his last complete novel. The chapter individuates distinct features of style from Dickens’s long-standing repertoire – including the dextrous use of adjectives and negatives, ingenuity of syntax and inversion, sound and word play, renovation of idiom and cliché – to show Dickens flaunting and holding up to inspection his own characteristic verbal and phrasal habits.

Prepositions typically denote relations in space or time, but this is not definitive. Our analysis of prepositions diverges significantly from the traditional view. Where that requires PPs to have NP objects, we allow a much fuller range of complements, including content clauses and no complement, making many traditional ‘subordinating conjunctions’ and adverbs prepositions. Prepositions rarely have inflected forms. They can usually be modified by AdvPs, notably ‘right’ and ‘straight’.

PPs commonly function as complements and adjuncts. They may function predicative complements, but rarely in ‘become’ VPs. As adjuncts, PPs don’t require a predicand. A number of prepositions have grammaticized uses, such as ‘by’ in passive clauses. Many prepositions can be stranded or fronted, a choice affected by various syntactic factors. Some unusual prepositions, such as ‘ago’, must follow a measure expression.

Certain verbs license particles, dependents that may appear between a verb and its object, an unusual situation, usually a PP. Many verb + preposition combinations have idiomatic meanings, but we reject the ‘phrasal verb’ analysis because the combinations are not phrases.

All aspects of linguistic knowledge are ultimately based on speakers’ experience with lexical expressions, but of course, knowledge of language, notably, grammar, exceeds their memory of particular lexical tokens. It is a standard assumption of the usage-based approach that grammar involves a taxonomic network of constructions ranging from prefabricated strings of lexical expressions to highly abstract schemas. Chapter 4 describes the taxonomic organization of constructions and their development in L1 acquisition and language change. It includes a detailed discussion of current research on statistical grammar learning in infancy, the acquisition of constructions during the preschool years and two case studies on the rise of constructional schemas in language history.

All linguistic elements, e.g., words, phrases and clauses, occur in sequential order. The sequential arrangement of linguistic elements is motivated by conceptual and pragmatic factors, but the strength of sequential relations is primarily determined by automatization or chunking. Since automatization is a gradual process driven by frequency of occurrence, sequential relations vary on a continuum. Moreover, since language unfolds in time, sequential relations have an inherent forward orientation, which is reflected in the fact that listeners are able to “predict” upcoming elements in the unfolding speech stream. Chapter 5 considers the effect of automatization and chunking on the development of linguistic structure and the cognitive organization of grammar. The chapter is divided into two parts. The first part is concerned with research on lexical prefabs and the organization of morphological network models, and the second part considers sequential aspects of constructional schemas and the gradience of constituency.