The present volume is a corpus-based study of the occurrence, variation, and change in the use of English adjective pairs in -ic and -ical over several centuries. The study involves the analysis of large, multi-million-word corpora representing the English language at various stages. It examines the nature of competition between the two affixes: what kind of rivalry existed, what kinds of words entered into competition, and in what ways the rivalry was resolved. The book presents close studies of six notably differentiated -ic/-ical adjective pairs, namely classic/classical, comic/comical, economic/economical, electric/electrical, historic/historical, and magic/magical, as well as commentaries on some 40 other -ic/-ical pairs, which manifest different types of shifts in use through history.

Textual Patterns joins a collection of other corpus-linguistics books as the 22nd volume in the series Studies in Corpus Linguistics. What distinguishes this publication from others is a well balanced emphasis on corpus-based theories, its "how-to" approaches, and its constant emphasis on the implications of corpus-based analyses. This distinction makes the book another good resource on introductory corpus-linguistics for language teachers, researchers, and learners.