This project concentrates on the study of the origin and development of English adverbial connectives (prepositions, conjunctions, conjuncts), from the point of view of long diachrony, from Old to Present-day English. Special attention is focused on the role played by grammaticalisation and contact in this development and on the varying frequency between synonymous native connectives (e.g. þa and þonne; ere and before), between native and borrowed items (e.g. for and because, outtaken and except), and between older and newer layers of grammaticalized items (e.g. whenever and any/each/every+time). Our approach is variationist: genre-based, sociolinguistic and diatopic variation is taken into consideration. A number of historical and present-day English corpora are used for finding evidence. One of these is the pioneering Helsinki Corpus of English Texts, which covers the period from Old English to the beginning of the eighteenth century.