This book has grown out of many years of studying adverbials and other word order-related matters from a functional perspective. Adverbials are fascinating because of their enormous semantic and syntactic flexibility, as well as their elusiveness. In many ways a functional study of adverbials thus becomes a study of text and language in general.

During the work on this book I have had the advantage of two periods of research leave from the former Department of British and American Studies and the present Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages at the University of Oslo. Parts of chapters have been presented at various seminars and conferences in Oslo and elsewhere, and I am indebted to my various audiences for useful feedback. I would like to thank Merja Kytö for her encouragement during the early stages of this project. At later stages I received constructive and helpful responses from anonymous referees at Cambridge University Press. I am also grateful to colleagues in Oslo for useful discussions and for contributing to a fruitful research environment, and to my friends and family for a healthy mixture of support and distraction. In particular, I would like to thank my colleague, friend and mentor Stig Johansson for guiding me into corpus linguistics in the first place and for invaluable help, advice and encouragement during all my years of researching the English language.