Project description

Speakers can often choose between several constructions that express a similar meaning. This project looks at one such alternation, namely the competition between preposition stranding (a topic which I want to know more about) and preposition pied-piping (a topic about which I want to know more). In standard varieties of English, the choice between stranding and pied-piping is to a large degree determined by processing factors and register (Biber et al. 1999: 107; Hawkins 1999: 277; Gries 2002; Hoffmann 2011). At the same time, Hoffmann (2011) showed that Kenyan English has a stronger preference for constructions that are easy to process than British English, while stylistic variables turned out to be less important in the L2 variety. In the light of these findings, the present study combines Usage-based Construction Grammar and New Englishes approaches to investigate the use of stranding and pied-piping constructions across 12 varieties of English. It aims to answer the following research questions:

1. Which factors influence the choice between the two variants in the various varieties?

2. Do processing factors have a stronger effect in L2 Englishes?

3. Does the evolutionary state of the New English varieties correlate with certain types of preposition stranding and pied-piping constructions?

The study will thus generate important insights into the storage of competing structures in the mental grammars of speakers. In addition, it will expand our knowledge on qualitative and quantitative innovations and the role of processing effects in the evolution of New Englishes.

Project phases

The project consists of two phases.

Phase I: Corpus study

• Preposition stranding and pied-piping will be analyzed in the following components of the International Corpus of English (ICE):

  • ICE-Canada

  • ICE-Great Britain

  • ICE-Hong Kong

  • ICE-India

  • ICE-Ireland

  • ICE-Jamaica

  • ICE-Kenya

  • ICE-New Zealand

  • ICE-Nigeria

  • ICE-Philippines

  • ICE-Singapore

  • ICE-Tanzania

• Following previous studies (Gries 2002; Hoffmann 2011), the data will be coded for a wide range of factors such as:

  • PREPOSITION PLACEMENT (stranding, pied-piping)

  • CLAUSE TYPE (finite relative clause, main clause interrogative, etc.)

  • PP TYPE (prepositional verb, location adjunct PP, time adjunct PP, etc.)

  • PHRASE TYPE (VP, NP, AdjP)

  • VOICE (active, passive)

  • FILLER TYPE (who, whom, which, what, whose, etc.)

  • PREPOSITION (in, on, at, etc.)

  • FREQUENCY OF PREPOSITION (relative frequencies computed for each individual ICE corpus)

  • FREQUENCY OF FILLER (relative frequencies computed for each individual ICE corpus)

  • LENGTH OF FILLER (length of extracted phrase in number of words)

  • COMPLEXITY (number of words between WH-word and gap site)

  • TEXT TYPE (ICE text type)

  • VARIETY (ICE variety)

  • VARIETY TYPE (according to Schneider’s (2007) Dynamic Model)

• The data will be subjected to multifactorial statistical analyses (e.g. generalized linear mixed-effects modeling).

Phase II: Experimental study

• Magnitude estimation acceptability experiments will be conducted at the following universities to analyze how speakers rate the acceptability of constructions:

  • University of Edinburgh (UK)

  • University of Texas at Austin (US)

  • National University of Singapore (Singapore)

  • University of Cape Town (South Africa)

  • Hong Kong (SAR of China)

  • University of Nairobi (Kenya)

References

Biber, Douglas, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad & Edward Finegan. 1999. The Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. 1999th edn. Harlow: Longman.

Gries, Stefan Thomas. 2002. Preposition Stranding in English: Predicting Speakers’ Behaviour. In Vida Samiian (ed.), Proceedings of the Western Conference on Linguistics, vol. 12, 230–241. Fresno: California State University.

Hawkins, John A. 1999. Processing Complexity and Filler-Gap Dependencies across Grammars. Language. Linguistic Society of America 75. 244–285

Hoffmann, Thomas. 2011. Preposition Placement in English: A Usage-based Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Schneider, Edgar W. 2007. Postcolonial English: Varieties around the World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.