Preposition Pied Piping and Stranding in Academic and Popular Nigerian English Writing

Roseline Abonego Adejare

doi:10.5539/ijel.v11n4p40

Abstract

This paper examined preposition pied piping and stranding in academic and popular Nigerian English writing with a view to determining their pattern of occurrence. Preposition placement has not been studied in Nigerian English and in specific genres. The 160 246-word relevant component of ICE-Nigeria was the sub-corpus used, and the Systemic Theory guided the study. Analysed using a multi-layered qualitative approach, the data comprised 112 cases of pied piping, 64 of stranding and 4 of doubling. Pied piping was dominant over stranding in Academic Writing (78 percent v 22 percent), and stranding was 1.7 times more frequent in Popular Writing than in Academic Writing. Though evenly distributed in Popular Writing (44 each), pied piping was about twice as frequent as stranding in Popular Natural Sciences while stranding was virtually non-existent in Academic Natural Sciences. Whereas to-infinitive and passive clauses were stranding favourite sites (21 and 15 respectively), only in wh-relative clauses did pied piping operate and in which was the prominent sequence. In Academic Writing prepositions were pied-piped and stranded at an average of 3.83 and 1.82 per form respectively, but the rates were 3.31 and 3.1 in Popular Writing. Whereas in was the most pied-piped preposition and was 5.2 times more likely to be pied-piped than stranded, up was the most stranded form and its stranding relative to pied piping was infinitely more. Subtle differences in the genres&rsquo; degree of formality explain the disparities in the distribution of pied piping and stranding in the sub-corpus analysed.

Highlights

1.1 BackgroundThe term preposition was derived from Latin praepenere, which means “put before” or “preceding position” (Chalker & Weiner, 1994, p. 310, cited in Hoffmann, 2011, p. 76; Greenbaum & Nelson, 2002, p. 71)
This paper examined preposition pied piping and stranding in academic and popular Nigerian English writing with a view to determining their pattern of occurrence
This study aims to examine pied piping and stranding as preposition placement options in academic and popular Nigerian English writing with a view to determining their pattern of occurrence

Summary

Introduction

1.1 BackgroundThe term preposition was derived from Latin praepenere, which means “put before” or “preceding position” (Chalker & Weiner, 1994, p. 310, cited in Hoffmann, 2011, p. 76; Greenbaum & Nelson, 2002, p. 71). The preposition normally comes before its complement (e.g., “This is the house in which we live”), there are exceptions where the complement is moved to the front and the preposition is left alone by itself or “deferred” (e.g., “This is the house which we live in”). These two alternative structures respectively exemplify preposition pied piping (PP) and preposition stranding (PS) Stranding entails prepositioning the wh-relative pronoun on its own, leaving the preposition “orphaned” as in “They asked [who he was referring to]”. There are syntactic contexts which obligatorily demand stranding only, namely passive constructions, infinitive clauses, -ing clauses, ijel.ccsenet.org

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