Position of also

Word order question - whether to put also before or after the verb.

In the British National Corpus, verbs are followed by also 61,207 times. Here is the list of the top ones, all but one being auxiliaries.

be 32086

have 7519

will 4662

can 3610

may 3059

would 1875

should 1466

see * 1399

must 1226

could 1163

might 578

shall 114

do 67

Then the lexical verbs

also + verb = 78114

Of the seven most frequent verb forms following also, six are lexical (none of the above auxiliaries)

also vvn 17405

also vvd 13853

also vvz 10405

also vvi 9604

also vvb 7387

also vbi * 7065 (infinitive of 'be')

also vvg 3281

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62,235 which is 80% of all occurences of this word order

* vbi was not included.

This might sound familiar to those who have learnt the position of adverbs of frequency.

This page comes from another of my sites, but somewhere

there is a more complete one, methinks.