The processes of preposition omission across English variety types

Abstract

This chapter examines the omission of standard English prepositions across English as a native language (ENL), English as a second language (ESL), and English as a foreign language (EFL) corpora. Preposition omission is often listed among typical nonstandard features in several ENL and ESL varieties, but no study to date has systematically compared this feature across different varieties and types of Englishes (ENL, ESL, and EFL). The focus of this study is on charting the contexts where the omission of prepositions occurs, identifying commonalities and differences between patterns of preposition omission across different types of Englishes, and examining the possible sources for and the variables influencing this feature. By including learner English (EFL), we extend the conversation from World Englishes to the processes that unite and distinguish learner Englishes and contact-induced varieties of English, contributing to the discussion on error vs. innovation and the conceptualization of linguistic creativity (Deshors et al. 2018) in these two types of non-native Englishes. The findings of this study show that the range of contexts for preposition omission is much broader than previously documented. Preposition omission is a conventionalized feature of specific contexts of ENL, while EFL corpora manifest more frequent and diverse usages. ESL corpora share characteristics of both ENL and EFL. There are also notable qualitative differences across variety types, indicating that L1 influence, semantic redundancy, as well as cognitive processes of non-native language use influence the observed patterns in various ways.