Governed prepositions in english: A corpus-based study

Abstract

The paper is a corpus-based analysis of English governed prepositions, which are, due to their considerable frequency, an important part of English grammar. It starts with a discussion of the concept of government, its different applications in linguistics and confusion it often creates. Government is a syntactic relation in which one constituent determines the grammatical form of its dependent. It also has a semantic side to it – the grammatical marking resulting from government denotes the relational meaning of the dependent in the context of the given head word. The paper presents and discusses results of a series of corpus case studies. Each case study examined a grammatical pattern (a head word with a dependent preposition) against a sample of occurrences of the head from the British National Corpus. Detailed analysis of the results aimed to decide whether the given pattern involves government. A general objective was to identify quantitative and qualitative characteristics of government (and nongovernment). From the empirical perspective of language corpora, government seems to be best envisaged as a gradable phenomenon. While all case studies showed considerable variation in the observed patterns of the head word, much of it is explicable by syntactic, pragmatic or stylistic considerations and does not contradict government. However, some of the tested patterns were judged to be non-governed. These involved inter alia the tested pattern being part of an antonym set or contextual synonym set.