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. The most comprehensive survey of a fundamental feature of the grammar to appear to date Gregory Anderson is a researcher at the Department of Linguistics, University of Oregon, and at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. He is engaged in primary descriptive, typological, and comparative research on endangered languages of south-central Siberia, Turkic languages, the isolate Burushaski language of northern Pakistan, the Eleme language of Nigeria, and the Munda languages of India. He has written fieldwork-based descriptive grammars, bilingual dictionaries, and books on comparative/historical and historical/sociolinguistic topics in Turkic linguistics as well as numerous articles on a range of typological, areal, and historical linguistic topics.