6 - Prepositions and postpositions

Summary

Introduction

The present chapter covers a hitherto neglected area of word-order variation involving the syntactic rivalry between post- and prepositions in English. By comparing the distribution in BrE and AmE, it contributes to the underlying purpose of the book, which is to discern discrepancies and similarities in the grammars of both varieties. Since word-order differences between BrE and AmE are rarely mentioned in the literature, a brief survey will suffice.

A case in point is the positioning of adverbs that are associated with complex predicates (auxiliary + main verb). Empirical research done by Jacobson (1975: 155–225) on ten years of selected American newspapers in the late 1960s reveals that AmE allows for more than 20 per cent of preposed adverbial usage, as in (1). BrE, by contrast, uses the adverb in mid-position, as illustrated in (2) in 96 per cent of all cases (see Britt Sandberg's newspaper data from 1969 in Jacobson 1981: 89–93).

1. The search already has cost Shell $9 million in the offshore area. (Jacobson 1975: 166)

2. The boycott has already cost the state as much as $20 million … (Guardian 92)

Further research on word-order variation includes split negative infinitives as in (3), which again occur far more often in AmE than in BrE, where the standard contiguous placement, as in (4), is still the clearly preferred variant (see Chapter 19 by Rohdenburg and Schlüter; for the use of the split infinitive in AmE, see also Fitzmaurice 2000, Kato 2001).