Complex Prepositions Research Articles

From complex prepositions to complex subordinators: challenging generalizations

ABSTRACT This paper presents a first approximation of the relationships within and between complex prepositions and complex subordinators from a cognitive vantage point. Because of the similarities between the two categories at the syntactic and functional levels of analysis, we first hypothesize the existence of a common productive schema that encompasses members of both classes within the framework of Construction Grammar. We then put forward a methodology developed in Diachronic Construction Grammar to analyze the within- and between-category constructional links in complex prepositions and complex subordinators in American English. We use multivariate quantitative methods to highlight the similarities and dissimilarities between the categories and make them visually identifiable. The application of this methodology to historical corpus data reveals that contrary to our expectations, complex prepositions form a relatively stable schema over time, without converging towards a common schema with the loosely connected complex subordinators under scrutiny.

According to NP: A Diachronic Perspective on a Skeptical Evidential

One of the problems challenging formal semantic studies of evidentiality is that reportative evidentials are not always representative of the speaker’s endorsement of the truth of the propositions they qualify. Accordingly, many of the functions of the reportative evidential according to NP in English are often ambiguous as to the speaker’s endorsement of the propositions over which they have scope. The present study, using three diachronic corpora, traces the evolution of evidential meanings in according to NP since Middle English times from its origins in a progressive aspect construction and its later shift from a manner adverbial function to a reportative evidential used to justify the speaker’s subjective beliefs. The article shows that the presence of comparative contexts, multiple information sources, or co-occurrence with adversative clauses contributes to the use of the reportative as a dubitative, marking the gradual objectification of the proposition qualified by according to and coinciding closely with the introduction of the complex preposition in accordance with in the late eighteenth century. I argue that the diachronic development of according to NP as an evidential marker represents a case of co-optation rather than grammaticalization.

From space to time and beyond: A corpus inquiry into the grammaticalization patterns of a/one step away from

ABSTRACT Cross-linguistically, spatial expressions display a propensity to undergo semantic extensions, thus frequently giving rise to grammatical markers. Drawing on diachronic material derived from the Corpus of Historical American English and synchronic data extracted from the Corpus of Contemporary American English, this study reports on a hitherto unexplored, incipient change of this kind, namely that affecting the multiword string a/one step away from. It is shown that with the conventionalization of the invited inference of closeness, the construction at issue was reanalyzed as a complex preposition, functioning initially as an exponent of prospective aspect, then additionally as a similitude marker, and finally also as an approximator. This chronology further finds reflection in the current functional gradience of a/one step away from, in that among its grammatical instances, which amount to slightly more than half the tokens in the sample, aspectual uses constitute the largest proportion, followed by similative occurrences and degree modifier attestations. At the distributional level, the investigated case of grammaticalization manifests itself in the highly confined determination and modification patterns of the form step, counterbalanced by the entire expression’s compatibility with inanimate subjects as well as host-class expansion to abstract NPs, verbal gerunds, and adjectives.

Yoruba ni and si: An asymmetry in the class of prepositions

This paper examines two grammatical elements ní and sí which have been considered as prepositions in the grammar of Yoruba (Benue-Congo). We argue that these two elements belong to different word classes; ní is a preposition, while sí is a verb. We present novel data that show syntactic asymmetries that exist between the two elements: behavior under extraction, the possibility of pseudocleft formation, the order of the phrases in a clause, iteration, formation of complex prepositions, and subcategorization. The ní-phrase acts like an adjunct phrase but this is not so with the sí-phrase. The adjunct phrase is a prepositional phrase headed by ní. It is demonstrated that the preposition constitutes a phase head in Yoruba, thus movement out of the PP is banned which explains the lack of preposition stranding with ní. The element sí, on the other hand, can be stranded. It is argued that sí is the non-initial verb in a serial verb construction.

Changesin the midst ofa construction network: a diachronic construction grammar approach to complex prepositions denoting internal location

AbstractLinguists have debated whether complex prepositions deserve a constituent status, but none have proposed a dynamic model that can both predict what construal a given pattern imposes and account for the emergence of non-spatial readings. This paper reframes the debate on constituency as a justification of the constructional status of complex prepositional patterns from a historical perspective. It focuses on thePrep NPILof NPlmconstruction, which denotes a relation of internal location between a located entity (a trajector) and a reference entity (a landmark). Four subschemas of the Internal Location construction are examined:middlecxn(in the middle of),centercxn(in/at the center of),heartcxn(in/at the heart of), andmidstcxn(in the midst of). All occurrences are extracted from the COHA, along with their co-occurring landmark NPs. Using vocabulary growth curves, all patterns are shown to be productive over the whole period covered by the corpus, although at different levels. Usingword2vec, a semantic vector space with the landmark collocates of each pattern is made. Curves indexed on association scores are plotted to see how densely semantic areas have been populated across four consecutive periods: 1810s–1860s, 1870s–1910s, 1920s–1970s, and 1980s–2000s. Two divisions of labor have emerged.midstcxnandheartcxnare in complementary distribution and operate mostly at the level of abstract locations whereasmiddlecxnandcentercxnare in parallel distribution and operate at the level of concrete locations.

Până-PPs and Complex Event Constructions in Romanian

"Până-PPs and Complex Event Constructions in Romanian. This paper examines the syntactic and semantic status of Romanian PPs headed by the morphologically complex prepositions până în/la ʻuntil/as far as/up to in/at’ in VPs of change of location (a pluti până în peșteră ʻfloat up to the caveʼ) and change of state (a munci până la epuizare ʻwork to the point of exhaustionʼ). Contrary to the claims made in the literature (Barbu 2015), the approach taken here argues that these – and other similar – VPs cannot be considered complex event constructions such as goal-of-motion structures and strong resultative constructions, respectively. The discussion revolves around the interpretation of the entire VP, the lack of any type of restriction on the syntactic and semantic classification of the verb, the violation of the Direct Object Restriction, as well as the borderline between these PPs and temporal adjuncts. These properties highlight the fact that the availability of such VPs does not turn Romanian into a satellite-framed language as they are not real counterexamples to the Talmian generalization according to which verb-framed Romanian disallows these two complex event constructions. Keywords: goal-of-motion structure, resultative construction, VP, până-PP, Romanian "

On corpus-driven research of complex adverbial prepositions with spatial meaning in Czech

Abstract Complex adverbial prepositions with spatial meaning have not been sufficiently studied so far in Czech. To establish a set of these expressions in their actual usage, the resources of the Czech National Corpus were used in this study. The research has shown that the SYN2020 corpus is a relevant tool for searching for two-word expressions with a LOCATIVE ADVERB – SIMPLE PREPOSITION structure that have the same function as a one-word locative preposition. The article describes a method for the extraction of these expressions from the corpus, as well as a method for the collection of their quantitative data using corpus tools. As a result of the research, a list of expressions that are presumably complex prepositions is provided.

In, English Prepositions

This research is a qualitative research which aims to describe the grammatical form of preposition in. This study uses Concordance to process Britain Awake's discourse in terms of Corpus Linguistics. This study shows that the preposition in can be in the form of simple prepositions and complex prepositions. These two forms of prepositions conform to the provisions put forward by experts, particularly the preposition formulas Preposition + Noun + Preposition. From the corpus data on oncordance, the simple prepositions is 73 (seventy three) and complex prepositions are 6 (six). The preposition in contains 13 (thirteen) of the 40 (forty) existing meanings.

PREPOSITIONAL PHRASE AND ITS TRANSLATIONS FOUND IN THE NOVEL “BUDHA, A STORY OF ENLIGHTENMENT”

The novel "Budha, A Story of Englightenment" is one of the famous novels with New York Times Best Selling authors. This novel tells the story as an icon of peace and serenity. Some sentences with the prepositional phrase and its translation from English into Indonesian are found in this novel. Therefore, the author is interested in analyzing the translation process in translating the source text into the target text. The source text is analysed and viewed to find out the translation of the prepositional phrase. This study aims at analyzing the source text and gets the meaning and its translation. It is stated that a prepositional phrase is a group of words consisting of a preposition, its object, and any words modifying the object. A prepositional phrase also modifies a verb or a noun. This theory stated that there are two types of prepositional phrases. In simple preposition, preposition consists of a single prepositional particle. In complex preposition, the preposition can be formed by using two or three prepositional particles separated with a noun, an adjective, and an adverb. There are some complex prepositional phrases. Those areas for, except for, according to, by means, on the part of, etc. This present study is intended to: (i) identify the types of lexical and syntactical forms of the English prepositional phrases found in the data source "Budha, A Story of Englightenment," (ii) analyse the types of shifts of prepositional phrases that were applied in the translation from the source text into target text in the novel "Budha, A Story of Englightenment."

How to Make New Use of Existing Resources:

This article discusses the history and regional variation of the complex preposition off of (e.g., I got off of the bus). The study is intended to uncover detailed information about the use of the form from Early Modern to Present-Day English by examining a variety of linguistic corpora and databases from different perspectives. In addition to charting the history and present-day variation of off of, the study will make a methodological contribution to historical dialectology by showing that there are extensive, severely underused resources that can reveal valuable information about the geographical variation of English even if they were not originally designed for that purpose. Most crucially, the article introduces a way to investigate Early Modern English from the perspective of regional variation, thus paving the way for future research in a field that has been extremely challenging to study in the past.

National and EU judicial phraseology under the magnifying glass: a corpus-assisted analysis of complex prepositions in Spanish

ABSTRACT Based on a monolingual comparable corpus made up of judgments delivered by the Spanish Supreme Court and by the Court of Justice of the European Union, this paper presents a case study on complex prepositions considered as a specific discourse feature of these two varieties. In spite of the initial hypothesis, according to which a higher percentage of these phraseological units was expected to be found in national texts, the results of the analysis show that EU judgments contain a higher percentage of complex prepositions, in line with the results obtained by Biel on a number of different legal genres in Polish. From a qualitative perspective, the study also compares similarities and differences in the phraseological patterns used in the two subcorpora, and hints at the untypical use of some units in the EU subcorpus, traditionally considered as traces of ‘translationese’, but functionally interpreted in this study as examples of contact-induced features characterising Spanish Eurolect.

THE TRANSLATION METHOD OF PREPOSITION ON J.D SALINGER’S NOVEL OF THE CATCHER IN THE RYE TRANSLATED BY GITA WIDYA LAKSMINI

This research tells about translation method of preposition. Preposition is the word that simple to translated, but it is complicate to find the good word, because there are so many meaning in dictionary. Even the translator does not always get the meaning from dictionary. This purpose of research is analyzing the translation of simple and complex preposition used in “J.D. Salinger’s Novel The Catcher in The Rye. And to find out the kinds of translation methods in translating of simple and complex preposition on it. The method of research uses descriptive qualitative method. Technique of collecting data, the researcher uses documentation. Technique of analyzing data, the researcher uses constant comparative method by Glaser and Strauss with four steps are data reduction, data categorization, data synthetization and hypothesis. The result of research is translator use four translation method of preposition. There are literal translation, semantic translation, free translation and communicative translation. mostly translator uses literal translation. Preposition has many meaning in dictionary, that’s why there are no word-for-word because researcher things that translator is process the translation of preposition. There are many kinds of preposition. The researcher dividing become two parts, are simple and complex (Randolph Quirk,1985). Simple preposition mostly available than complex in the novel. Because simple preposition is easy to find in the novel.Keywords: preposition, literal translation, semantic translation, free translation, communicative translation

An empirical perspective on the contact between English and French: a case study on substitutive complex prepositions

AbstractHistorical language contact has generally been approached qualitatively through the examination of different linguistic and extralinguistic factors. By contrast, frequency patterns, although widely acknowledged in other linguistic fields, have not received a great deal of attention in the contact linguistics literature. This paper attempts to bridge this methodological gap through the application of an experimental procedure borrowed from the field of learner corpus research and areal linguistics. In a pilot study on the well-known case of language contact between English and French, the potential contact effects of French on English with regard to the use of substitutive complex prepositions of the PNP type are investigated, using probabilistic multifactorial modeling. The goal is to show in what ways and to what extent English conforms to French in the use of in lieu of and in place of, but also the extent to which it deviates from the Romance language, assuming from the outset that French served as the model language. This approach to historical language contact methodologically enriches an ever-growing paradigm and also illustrates empirically what has been conceptualized as frequency effects in usage-based Construction Grammar.

On Grammaticalization of Complex Prepositions from Nominal Sources: With Reference to in addition to and in need of

This paper explores the semantic and functional evolutions of the English complex prepositions in addition to and in need of from a grammaticalization perspective. The two complex prepositions exhibit peculiar aspects in the evolutional process, whereby the prepositions are both derived from nominal sources, i.e. addition and need, and retain the vestige of their source meanings. In particular, they develop into the near-antonymous grammatical pairs referring to ‘additive’ and ‘caritive’ concepts through the grammaticalization processes. The historical evolution and semantic extension patterns are illustrated based on data provided from the synchronic and diachronic sources. Some select aspects relevant to the developmental paths of the two forms are also discussed with respect to the theoretical issues, such as the source determination hypothesis, desemanticization, decategorialization, and analogy. Distributional characteristics of the forms and their sources are analyzed to identify the role of human cognition as a contributor to enable language changes.

A Corpus-Based Study of Complex Prepositions in a Non-Native English Variety

This corpus-based study examined the occurrence and distribution of complex prepositions of the preposition-noun-preposition (PNP)-construction in a non-native English variety with a view to characterising it in the grammar. The data comprised 63 PNP-constructions with 585 occurrences retrieved from the 1,010,382-word International Corpus of English-Nigeria (2015). Motivated by the dearth of works on non-native varieties and underpinned by Construction Grammar, the study revealed an occurrence rate of 579 per million words (pmw). The PNP-constructions were one-and-a-half times more frequent in written (755 pmw) than in spoken (464 pmw) English and were most frequent in the domain Governance & Law (1368 pmw) and least frequent in General Interest Texts (402 pmw). Administrative Writing was the text type with the highest frequency of PNP-construction occurrence (2151 pmw), followed by Parliamentary Debates (1686 pmw); Demonstrations figured the least (49 pmw). In terms of, in addition to, in spite of and on behalf of were the prominent forms, respectively occurring 144, 37.6, 35.6 and 30.7 times pmw. Respect was the highest manifesting semantic category (49 percent) and its respect/disregard strain was dominant in Unscripted Speeches and Administrative Writing; time posted the lowest (0.2 percent). Whereas all the 63 PNP-constructions featured in the British National Corpus (BNC), only 6.1 percent of BNC’s132 low frequency forms also occurred in ICE-Nigeria. While 17 percent of BNC’s 30 most frequent PNP-constructions did not manifest in ICE-Nigeria, 64 percent of those present occurred more frequently in BNC than in ICE-Nigeria, with the differential as wide as 33:2.

CLASSIFICATION OF PREPOSITIONS OF STORY GENRE AS A WORK OF FICTION (on Material of A.S. Pushkin’s Story “The Queen of Spades” in Russian and English)

The article presents the prepositions’ classification. The aim of the research is to classify prepositions by types and frequency use (quantitative and percentage ratio) in the story genre as a work of fiction (on A. S. Pushkin’s story “The Queen of Spades” in Russian and English). To achieve the goal, it was necessary to solve the following tasks: 1) to study “The Queen of Spades” in Russian and English; 2) to make tables on the prepositions’ types; 3) to build diagrams on the prepositions’ types; 4) to describe the collected information. The author used in the material research: 1) component analysis method; 1. quantitative calculation method; 3) percentage calculation method; 4) classification method. In the course of studying the Russian version there are found prepositions that serve to express such relationship as: spatial, temporal, causal, target, mode of action and object; in English: prepositions of abstract relations (genitive case, dative case, instrumental case, prepositional case, accusative case), spatial, phrasal verbs, temporal, complex prepositions, causal and target. The found prepositions serve as a sample of bilingual texts for discursive activities not only for specialists, but also for those who are interested in problems related to prepositions in Russian and English. According to the study, it can be concluded that a detailed analysis of the tables and diagrams revealed the main characteristics of prepositions, making it possible to distribute them into appropriate groups; to find the main similarities between groups of English and Russian prepositions, as well as the differences between them.

Usage-based account of Italian Complex Prepositions denoting the Agent

AbstractThis paper takes into account a particular set of Italian Complex Prepositions signaling the agent of an action (e.g.da parte di‘by’,a nome di‘by’). Italian exhibits several types of complex prepositions revealing a different involvement of the Agent: in particular, these complex lexemes can introduce and distinguish the participants who (i) plan and intentionally conceive an action, (ii) perform it and/or (iii) have a coercive power over its performing.The contribution aims to: (i) distinguish these Italian complex prepositions according to their functions, meanings, and the degree of involvement of the participant they introduce; (ii) analyze the collocational features and the syntactic environments where these lexemes occur; (iii) individuate possible correlations between their frequency of occurrence and the grammatical value; (iv) analyze their diachronic evolution across different historical phases; (v) put into relation the synchronic restrictions with the original syntactic environment within which the complex prepositions have been reanalyzed.

On grammaticalized complex prepositions in Portuguese

AbstractSome complex prepositions (CPs) have long stories of grammaticalization behind them. In Portuguese, such is the case of the CPs that have started from simple elements such asanteortrás. In the present paper, I will observe the changes that have given rise to present-day Ptdiante de,perante,atrás de,detrás de, among other complex formations. It will be seen that spatial signaling (place or direction) plays an important role on the development of these prepositions, but that a tendency to neutralization of semantic differences may lead more recent forms to convey meanings already expressed by older forms, which in turn may spur the emergence of even more complex formations (de diante de,por detrás de, …). Increased complexity, however, seems to bring redundancy with it, a fact that calls for a satisfactory explanation. The complexification process is accompanied by context extension, from spatial to the temporal, and from these to more abstract realms (cause, condition, circumstance, …). As is to be expected from prepositions that are frequently used, they compete with other units, with which they may at first be in a complementary relation, but whose affinities in distribution and meaning may cause their replacement in the long run (diante deversusem face de,face a). Finally, another important phenomenon concerning these formations is their capacity to expand beyond their category, giving rise to morphologically related nouns and verbs.

Les prépositions complexes en français

AbstractIn this paper, we develop a new method of identification of complex prepositions, in French. We include well-known semantic and morpho-syntactic tests, and introduce a few others – together, these tests make up a multi-variable grid which we believe can help identify complex prepositions. We run these tests on a list of 75 sequences, most of which are considered to be complex adpositions. We also include sequences which share the same patterns of word formation but do not have prepositional uses, in order to check the validity of our grid. Our results show that the semantic and morpho-syntactic clues used to identify complex adpositions, combined with corpus data exploration, are on the whole quite effective, but to varying degrees depending on the pattern of formation.

Complex spatial prepositions from Latin to Castilian

AbstractFrom among the various processes that form prepositions in the history from Latin to Castilian, the investigation concentrates on the formation of prepositional adverbs like Spanishdelante (de)‘in front (of)’. There are two mechanisms for their formation: (a) An adverb or a preposition is preceded by a superordinate simple local preposition which initially specifies a local relation, but ends up as a reinforcing expansion of its base; and (b) an adverb is converted into a preposition by a following functional preposition which serves as a relationalizer.In case #a, the syntactic structure is often destroyed by univerbation, and the resulting reinforced preposition is lexicalized. In case #b, the alternation between adverb and relationalized preposition is regular and bidirectional, so that the combination of adverb and relationalizer is normally not univerbated. The exceptiondesdeis given some attention.As a result, the formation of prepositions of this structure is, at the outset, not a matter of word formation, and such complex prepositions are therefore not compound prepositions, but instead lexicalized univerbations.