8 - Prepositions

Summary

Dieter Mindt and Christel Weber (1989) concluded from a comparative study of prepositions in the Brown and LOB corpora that 99.9 percent of all prepositional tokens are of forms used in both British and American and that the six most common prepositions (of, in, to, for, with, on) have the same rank order in both varieties and account for nearly three quarters of the occurrences of prepositions in the two corpora. It is clear that prepositional differences are not mainly of form. There are, however, a good many differences in collocation and frequency.

Choice of preposition

The most significant prepositional differences are in the choice of one preposition over another in particular contexts, that is, the meaning of the preposition in context or its idiomatic use or collocational probabilities, especially in regard to the preposition's object. Cf. also §§ 11.1.1.2, 11.1.6.1, 11.1.6.2.1, 11.2.1, and 11.4.1.

Prepositions that are primarily American include (in) back of (Burchfield 1996, 85; Peters 2004, 60–1). CIC has 0.5 iptmw of in back of in British texts (four-fifths of them oral and the other fifth from popular journalism) and 7.3 in American texts (in all text categories except oral talk about lexicography, which is the smallest of all text categories and therefore unrepresentative).