Victoria Mußemann

Constructional Competition – Preposition Stranding and Pied-piping in World Englishes

Fachgebiet: Englische Sprachwissenschaft

Betreuer: Prof. Dr. Thomas Hoffmann

Abstract:

This PhD project looks at one specific structural alternation in English, namely preposition placement in filler‐gap constructions (cf. e.g. Hoffmann 2011; Pullum & Huddleston 2002; Ross 1986; van den Eynden 1996). Combining Usage-based Construction Grammar and New Englishes approaches, the project investigates the competition between preposition stranding (1) and preposition pied-piping (2) in syntactic environments that allow for both options:

     (1)  English is a language which I want to know more about.
     (2)  English is a language about which I want to know more.

Drawing on both corpus data from the International Corpus of English project (cf. Nelson et al. 2002) and Magnitude Estimation acceptability experiments, the study will take the results of multifactorial statistical analyses as an indicator for the mental entrenchment of meso- and macro-constructions for the two structural alternatives in different varieties of English. This approach will reveal to what degree the constructional competition of preposition stranding and pied-piping correlates with the evolutionary stage of a New English variety and how much the available preposition placement constructions in postcolonial Englishes are shaped by L1 transfer features. The project will thus generate important insights into the storage of competing structures in the linguistic knowledge of speakers and into the processing effects as well as the qualitative and quantitative constructional changes that characterize the evolution of New Englishes.

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