Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t8hqh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T13:17:11.718Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Complexity Principle at work with rival prepositions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2020

GÜNTER ROHDENBURG
GÜNTER ROHDENBURG*
Affiliation:
Department of English and American Studies, University of Paderborn, Warburger Strasse 100, 33098Paderborn, [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The present corpus-based study deals with eight sets of rivalling prepositions in verb-dependent prepositional phrases. The two or three members of these sets, though equivalent in specific uses, differ in terms of functional explicitness. For instance, in directional uses, into can be regarded as more explicit than in. The main objective is to demonstrate for each of these sets that, in line with the Complexity Principle, the more explicit items are favoured in more complex grammatical environments. The contexts under scrutiny include those produced by passivisation, Heavy NP Shift, object relativisation, the use of full object NPs rather than personal pronouns, and preposition stranding. Thus, we observe that – compared with basic active clauses – preposition stranding in the active induces increased shares of the more explicit prepositions in question. Predictably, even higher degrees of prepositional explicitness are found with the combination of preposition stranding and passivisation. Also, it is shown that Heavy NP Shift tends to trigger greater proportions of the more explicit prepositions than object relativisation. The observed tendencies hold for Present-day English and earlier stages of English as well as for morphologically related and unrelated rival prepositions.

Keywords

rival prepositionsordering constraintsfunctional explicitness and processing complexityPresent-day EnglishEarly Modern EnglishLate Modern English
Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 24 , Issue 4 , December 2020 , pp. 769 - 800
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Allerton, David. 1991. The greater precision of spoken language: Four examples from English. English Studies 72, 470–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Andersson, Evert. 1985. On verb complementation in written English (Lund Studies in English 71). Lund: Gleerup.Google Scholar
Atkinson, Martin, Kilby, David & Roca, Iggy.1988. Foundations of general linguistics, 2nd edn. London, Boston, Sydney and Wellington: Unwin Hyman.Google Scholar
Bauer, Laurie. 1994. Watching English change: An introduction to the study of linguistic change in Standard Englishes in the twentieth century. London and New York: Longman.Google Scholar
Berlage, Eva. 2014. Noun phrase complexity in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bolinger, Dwight. 1971. The phrasal verb. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Clark, Herbert & Clark, Eve. 1977. Psychology and linguistics: An introduction to psycholinguistics. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.Google Scholar
Cruttenden, Alan (ed.). 2008. Gimson's Pronunciation of English, 7th edn. London: Hodder.Google Scholar
d91–00, 02, 04–5: Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph on CD-ROM 1991–2000, 2002, 2004–5. Chadwyck-Healey/ProQuest. (478,837,273 words)Google Scholar
Davison, Alice & Lutz, Richard. 1985. Measuring syntactic complexity relative to discourse context. In Dowty, David R., Karttunen, Lauri & Zwicky, Arnold M. (eds.), Natural language parsing, 26–66. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Diessel, Holger. 2009. On the role of frequency and similarity in the acquisition of subject and object relative clauses. In Givón, Talmy & Shibatani, Masayoshi (eds.), Diachrony, acquisition, neuro-cognition, evolution, 251–76. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
ECF: Eighteenth-Century Fiction 1996. London: Chadwyck-Healey. (9,702,696 words, omitting duplicates)Google Scholar
ECF1: First part of the ECF containing only those authors born in the seventeenth century (*1660–*1699). (5,130,162 words)Google Scholar
EEPF: Early English Prose Fiction 1997–2000. London: Chadwyck-Healey. In association with the Salzburg Centre for Research on the English Novel SCREEN. (9,562,865 words)Google Scholar
Eitelmann, Matthias. 2016. Support for end-weight as a determinant of linguistic variation and change. English Language and Linguistics 20, 395–420.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
EPD: English Prose Drama 1996–7. London: Chadwyck-Healey. (26,454,639 words)Google Scholar
Fanego, Teresa. 2016. The Great Complement Shift revisited: The constructionalization of ACC-ing gerundives. Functions of Language 23, 84–119.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ford, Marilyn. 1983. A method for obtaining measures of local parsing complexity throughout sentences. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behaviour 22, 203–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
g90–05: Guardian (including The Observer 1994–2005) on CD-ROM 1990–2005. London: Chadwyck-Healey/ProQuest. (645,817,821 words)Google Scholar
German, James, Pierrehumbert, Janet & Kaufmann, Stefan. 2006. Evidence for phonological constraints on nuclear accent placement. Language 82, 152–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gibson, Edward. 1998. Linguistic complexity: Locality of syntactic dependencies. Cognition 68, 1–76.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Givón, Talmy. 1990. Syntax: A functional-typological introduction, vol. 2. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Hawkins, John A. 1999. Processing complexity and filler-gap dependencies across grammars. Language 75, 244–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hoekstra, Jarich. 1995. Preposition stranding and resumptivity in West Germanic. In Haider, Hubert, Olsen, Susan & Vikner, Sten (eds.), Studies in comparative Germanic syntax, 95–118. Dordrecht, Boston and London: Kluwer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hopper, Paul J. & Thompson, Sandra A.. 1980. Transitivity in grammar and discourse. Language 56, 251–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hornstein, Norbert & Weinberg, Amy. 1981. Case theory and preposition stranding. Linguistic Inquiry 12, 55–91.Google Scholar
Hundt, Marianne & Leech, Geoffrey. 2012. ‘Small is beautiful’: On the value of standard reference corpora for observing recent grammatical change. In Nevalainen, Terttu & Traugott, Elizabeth (eds.), The Oxford handbook of the history of English, 175–88. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
i93–4, 02–5: Independent and Independent on Sunday on CD-ROM 1993–4, 2002–5. London: ProQuest. (242,608,117 words)Google Scholar
Los Angeles Times on CD-ROM 1992–5. Knight Ridder Information Inc. (320,016,164 words)Google Scholar
L96–9: Los Angeles Times 1996–9 (courtesy of The Los Angeles Times Editorial Library). (275,506,490 words)Google Scholar
Keenan, Edward L. & Comrie, Bernard. 1977. Noun phrase accessibility and universal grammar. Linguistic Inquiry 8, 63–99.Google Scholar
Kimball, John. 1973. Seven principles of surface structure parsing in natural languages. Cognition 2, 15–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leech, Geoffrey N. 1969. Towards a semantic description of English. London and Harlow: Longmans.Google Scholar
m93–00: Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday on CD-ROM 1993–2000. London: Chadwyck-Healey. (206,762,410 words)Google Scholar
Mair, Christian. 2009. Corpora and the study of recent change in English. In Lüdeling, Anke & Kytö, Merja (eds.), Corpus linguistics (HSK – Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft/Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science), vol. 2, 1109–25. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.Google Scholar
Maling, Joan & Zaenen, Annie. 1985. Preposition stranding and passive. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 8, 197–209.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mondorf, Britta. 2009. More support for more-support: The role of processing constraints on the choice between synthetic and analytic comparative forms. Amsterdam and New York: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
OED: The Oxford English Dictionary (2nd edn) on CD-ROM 1992 (Version 1.10). Edited by Simpson, John A. and Weiner, Edmund S. C.. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Quirk, Randolph. 1957. Relative clauses in educated spoken English. English Studies 38, 97–109.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rohdenburg, Günter. 1996. Cognitive complexity and increased grammatical explicitness in English. Cognitive Linguistics 7, 149–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rohdenburg, Günter. 2000. The complexity principle as a factor determining grammatical variation and change in English. In Plag, Ingo & Schneider, Klaus Peter (eds.), Language use, language acquisition and language history: (Mostly) empirical studies in honour of Rüdiger Zimmermann, 25–44. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag.Google Scholar
Rohdenburg, Günter. 2002. Processing complexity and the variable use of prepositions in English. In Cuyckens, Hubert & Radden, Günter (eds.), Perspectives on prepositions, 79–100. Tübingen: Niemeyer.Google Scholar
Rohdenburg, Günter. 2003. Cognitive complexity and horror aequi as factors determining grammatical variation and change in English. In Rohdenburg, Günter & Mondorf, Britta (eds.), Determinants of grammatical variation in English, 205–49. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter Mouton.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rohdenburg, Günter. 2007. Functional constraints in syntactic change: The rise and fall of prepositional constructions in Early and Late Modern English. English Studies 88, 217–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rohdenburg, Günter. 2009. Reflexive structures. In Rohdenburg & Schlüter (eds.), 166–81.Google Scholar
Rohdenburg, Günter. 2014. Reflections on reflexives in Modern English. Anglia 132(3), 536–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rohdenburg, Günter. 2016. Testing two processing principles with respect to the extraction of elements out of complement clauses. English Language and Linguistics 20, 463–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rohdenburg, Günter. 2017. Formal asymmetries between active and passive clauses in Modern English: The avoidance of preposition stranding with verbs featuring omissible prepositions. Anglia 135(4), 700–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rohdenburg, Günter. 2018. On the differential evolution of simple and complex object constructions in English. In Cuyckens, Hubert, Smet, Hendrik De, Heyvaert, Liesbet & Maekelberghe, Charlotte (eds.), Explorations in English historical syntax, 77–104. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rohdenburg, Günter. 2019. Rivalling noun-dependent complements in Modern English: That- clauses and ‘complex’ gerunds. Anglia 137(2), 217–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rohdenburg, Günter & Schlüter, Julia. 2009. New departures. In Rohdenburg & Schlüter (eds.), 364–423.Google Scholar
Rohdenburg, Günter & Schlüter, Julia (eds.). 2009. One language, two grammars? Differences between British and American English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schlüter, Julia. 2005. Rhythmic grammar: The influence of rhythm on grammatical variation and change. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
t90–04: The Times and The Sunday Times on CD-ROM 1990–2004. London: Chadwyck-Healey/ProQuest. (729,848,339 words)Google Scholar
Temperley, David. 2003. Ambiguity avoidance in relative clauses. Language 79, 464–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tottie, Gunnel. 1995. The man Ø I love: An analysis of factors favouring zero relatives in written British and American English. In Melchers, Gunnel & Warren, Beatrice (eds.), Studies in Anglistics (Stockholm Studies in English 85), 201–15. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell.Google Scholar
Truswell, Robert. 2009. Preposition stranding, passivisation, and extraction from adjuncts. Linguistic Variation Yearbook 8, 131–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vosberg, Uwe. 2006. Die große Komplementverschiebung. Außersemantische Einflüsse auf die Entwicklung satzwertiger Ergänzungen im Neuenglischen. Tübingen: Narr.Google Scholar
Voss, Christian. 2001. Grammatische Variation und Sprachwandel im Bereich präpositionaler Konstruktionen des Englischen. MA thesis, University of Paderborn.Google Scholar
Wanner, Anja. 2009. Deconstructing the English passive. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter Mouton.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wasow, Thomas. 2002. Postverbal behavior. Stanford: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Wasserman, Robert David. 1976. Theories of linguistic variation. PhD dissertation, University of Indiana.Google Scholar
Yáñez-Bouza, Nuria. 2015. Grammar, rhetoric and usage in English: Preposition placement 1500–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar