Cover not available
Part of
English Historical Linguistics: Change in structure and meaning
Edited by Bettelou Los, Claire Cowie, Patrick Honeybone and Graeme Trousdale
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 358] 2022
► pp. 201–224

Chapter 8
Prepositions in Early Modern English argument structure and beyond

ORCID logo | University of Zurich
ORCID logo | University of Zurich
This paper is the first to use a bottom-up, corpus-based, exploratory approach to the full range of prepositions in Early Modern English argument structure. Contrary to what previous research leads us to expect, the overall token frequency of prepositions during this period decreases, and they are not always successful against the older NP-variants. Similarly, our case study challenges earlier suggestions that PP-complements are particularly frequent in second-language varieties of English. With respect to the functions taken on by PPs in the clause, however, we provide preliminary evidence that more complement-like uses increase at the expense of more adjunct-like arguments, i.e., that PPs become more important as core elements of the clause.
Keywords: prepositions, verbal argument structure, bottom-up approach, Early Modern English, World Englishes
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Prepositions: Previous research on variation and change
  • 3.Prepositional patterns in EModE
    • 3.1Methodology
    • 3.2Hypotheses
    • 3.3Results
  • 4.Competition between NP- and PP-complementation in EModE and WEs
    • 4.1Methodology
    • 4.2Hypotheses
    • 4.3Results
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • Sources
  • References
Published online: 2 February 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.358.08zeh
References (61)
Sources
Bosworth–Toller = Bosworth, Joseph. 2010. An Anglo–Saxon dictionary online. (edited by T. Northcote Toller & others; compiled by Sean Christ & Ondrej Tichý). [URL] (6 January, 2021)
COCA = Davies, Mark. 2008–. The corpus of contemporary American English (COCA): 560 million words, 1990-present. [URL] (6 January, 2021)
COHA = Davies, Mark. 2010–. The corpus of historical American English (COHA): 400 million words, 1810–2009. [URL] (6 January, 2021)
ICE = International corpus of English. [URL] (6 January, 2021)
OED = Oxford English Dictionary Online. 2017. Oxford: OUP. [URL] (6 January, 2021)
PPCEME = Kroch, Anthony, Beatrice Santorini & Lauren Delfs. 2004. The Penn-Helsinki parsed corpus of Early Modern English (PPCEME), 1st edn., release 3. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania. [URL] (6 January, 2021)
PPCME2 = Kroch, Anthony & Ann Taylor. 2000. The Penn-Helsinki parsed corpus of Middle English (PPCME2), 2nd edn., release 4. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania. [URL] (6 January, 2021)
Randall, Beth. 2009. CorpusSearch 2: A tool for linguistic research. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania. [URL] (6 January, 2021)
References
Allen, Cynthia. 1995. Case marking and reanalysis: Grammatical relations from Old to Early Modern English. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Bergh, Gunnar. 1998. Double prepositions in English. In Jacek Fisiak & Marcin Krygier (eds.), English historical linguistics 1996, 1–13. Berlin: Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bergh, Gunnar & Aimo Seppänen. 2000. Preposition stranding with wh-relatives: A historical survey. English Language and Linguistics 4(2). 295–316. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Biber, Douglas, Gray, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad & Edward Finegan. 1999. Longman grammar of spoken and written English. Harlow: Pearson.Google Scholar
Ciszek-Kiliszewska, Ewa. 2014. Middle English preposition twēn(e). Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 49(3). 91–111. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2015. The Middle English preposition and adverb atwēn. In Brian Lowrey & Fabienne Toupin (eds.), Studies in linguistic variation and change: From Old to Middle English, 41–63. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars.Google Scholar
Claridge, Claudia. 2000. Multi-word verbs in Early Modern English. A corpus-based study. Amsterdam: Rodopi. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
De Cuypere, Ludovic. 2013. Debiasing semantic analysis: The case of the English preposition to. Language Sciences 37. 122–135. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2015a. A multivariate analysis of the Old English ACC+DAT double object alternation. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 11(2). 225–254. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2015b. The Old English to-dative construction. English Language and Linguistics 19(1). 1–26. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Denison, David. 1981. Aspects of the history of English group-verbs. With particular attention to the syntax of the Ormulum. Oxford: Oxford University PhD thesis.
. 1993. English historical syntax. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Dreschler, Gea. 2015. Passives and the loss of verb second: A study of syntactic and information-structural factors. Utrecht: LOT.Google Scholar
Goldberg, Adele. 2013. Constructionist approaches. In Thomas Hoffmann & Graeme Trousdale (eds.), The Oxford handbook of construction grammar, 15–31. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Greenbaum, Sidney (ed.). 1996. Comparing English worldwide: The International Corpus of English. Oxford: Clarendon.Google Scholar
Gries, Stefan & Martin Hilpert. 2008. The identification of stages in diachronic data: Variability-based neighbor clustering. Corpora 3(1). 59–81. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hoffmann, Thomas. 2005. Variable vs. categorical effects: Preposition pied piping and stranding in British English relative clauses. Journal of English Linguistics 33(3). 257–297. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2011. Preposition placement in English: A usage-based approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hothorn, Torsten, Kurt Hornik & Achim Zeileis. 2006. Unbiased recursive partitioning: A conditional inference framework. Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics 15. 651–674. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Huddleston, Rodney & Geoffrey Pullum. 2002. The Cambridge grammar of the English language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hundt, Marianne. 1998. New Zealand English grammar. Fact or fiction? Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2009. Colonial lag, colonial innovation, or simply language change? In Günter Rohdenburg & Julia Schlüter (eds.), One language, two grammars: Morphosyntactic differences between British and American English, 13–37. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2018. Variable article usages with institutional nouns. An ‘oddment’ of English? In Alex Ho-Cheong Leung & Wim van der Wurff (eds.), The noun phrase in English: Past and present, 113–142. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hundt, Markus. 2001. Grammatikalisierungsphänomene bei Präpositionalobjekten in der deutschen Sprache. Zeitschrift für germanistische Linguistik 29(2). 167–191. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Iglesias-Rábade, Luis. 2011. Semantic erosion of Middle English prepositions. Frankfurt: Lang.Google Scholar
Lundskær-Nielsen, Tom. 1993. Prepositions in Old and Middle English. Odense: Odense University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
McFadden, Thomas. 2002. The rise of the to-dative in Middle English. In David Lightfoot (ed.), Syntactic effects of morphological change, 107–123. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mitchell, Bruce. 1985. Old English syntax, Volume 1. Oxford: Clarendon. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Molencki, Rafał. 2005. On the syntactic and semantic development of after in medieval English. In Marcin Krygier & Liliana Sikorska (eds.), Naked wordes in Englissh, 47–67. Frankfurt: Lang.Google Scholar
. 2007. On the rise of the temporal preposition/conjunction before. In Marcin Krygier & Liliana Sikorska (eds.), To make his Englissh sweete upon his tonge, 37–54. Frankfurt: Lang.Google Scholar
. 2011. New prepositions and subordinating conjunctions of Romance origin in Middle English. In Jacek Fisiak & Magdalena Bator (eds.), Foreign influences on Medieval English, 9–24. Frankfurt: Lang.Google Scholar
Mukherjee, Joybrato & Marco Schilk. 2012. Exploring variation and change in New Englishes: Looking into the International Corpus of English (ICE) and beyond. In Terttu Nevalainen & Elizabeth C. Traugott (eds.), The Oxford handbook of the history of English, 189–199. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Mustanoja, Tauno F. 1960. A Middle English syntax, Volume 1. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique.Google Scholar
Nelson, Gerald & Ren Hongtao. 2012. Particle verbs in African Englishes: Nativization and innovation. In Marianne Hundt & Ulrike Gut (eds.), Mapping unity and diversity world-wide: Corpus-based studies of New Englishes, 197–213. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nykiel, Joanna. 2014. Semantic dependencies and the history of ellipsis alternation. In Michael Adams, Laurel Brinton & Richard D. Fulk (eds.), Studies in the history of the English language VI: Evidence and method in histories of English, 51–70. Berlin: de Gruyter.Google Scholar
. 2015. Constraints on ellipsis alternation: A view from the history of English. Language Variation and Change 27(2). 227–254. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech & Jan Svartvik. 1985. A comprehensive grammar of the English language. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Rostila, Jouni. 2007. Konstruktionsansaetze zur Argumentmarkierung im Deutschen. Tampere: Juvenes.Google Scholar
Sato, Kiriko. 2009. The development from case-forms to prepositional constructions in Old English prose. Bern: Lang.Google Scholar
Schneider, Gerold. 2008. Hybrid long-distance functional dependency parsing. Zurich: University of Zurich PhD dissertation. [URL] (8 October, 2018)
Schneider, Gerold & Lena Zipp. 2013. Discovering new verb-preposition combinations in New Englishes. Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English 13. [Online journal]Google Scholar
Schneider, Gerold, Marianne Hundt & Daniel Schreier. 2020. Pluralized non-counts nouns across Englishes: A corpus-linguistic approach to variety types. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 16(3). 515–546. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Siew, Tan. 2016. Charting the endonormative stabilization of Singapore English. In Gerhard Leitner, Azirah Hashim & Hans-Georg Wolf (eds.), Communicating with Asia: The future of English as a global language, 69–84. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Smirnova, Elena. 2015. Constructionalization and constructional change: The role of context in the development of constructions. In Jóhanna Barðdal, Spike Gildea, Elena Smirnova & Lotte Sommerer (eds.), Diachronic construction grammar, 81–106. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
de Swart, Henriëtte & Joost Zwarts. 2009. Less form – more meaning: Why bare singular nouns are special. Lingua 119(2). 280–295. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt. 2012. Analyticity and syntheticity in the history of English. In Terttu Nevalainen & Elizabeth C. Traugott (eds.), The Oxford handbook of the history of English, 654–665. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Traugott, Elizabeth C. 1972. A history of English syntax. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.Google Scholar
1992. Syntax. In Richard Hogg (ed.), The Cambridge history of the English language, Volume 1, 168–289. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Traugott, Elizabeth C. & Trousdale, Graeme. 2013. Constructionalization and constructional changes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tyler, Andrea & Vyvyan Evans. 2003. The semantics of English prepositions: Spatial scenes, embodied meaning, and cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Yáñez-Bouza, Nuria. 2015. Grammar, rhetoric and usage in English: Preposition placement 1500–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zehentner, Eva. 2019. Competition in language change: The rise of the English dative alternation. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by (2)

Cited by two other publications

Zehentner, Eva, Marianne Hundt, Gerold Schneider & Melanie Röthlisberger
2023. Differences in syntactic annotation affect retrieval. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 28:3 ► pp. 378 ff. DOI logo
Zehentner, Eva
2022. Revisiting Gradience in Diachronic Construction Grammar: PPs and the Complement-Adjunct Distinction in the History of English. Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 70:3 ► pp. 301 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 4 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.