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Title:
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Preposition Pied Piping and Stranding in British and Kenyan English: An experimental- and corpus-based construction grammar analysis
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Author:
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Thomas Hoffmann
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Email:
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click here to access email
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Homepage:
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http://www-englishlinguistics.uni-regensburg.de/Staff/Hoffmann/
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Degree Awarded:
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Universität Regensburg
, English Linguistics
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Degree Date:
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2007
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Linguistic Subfield(s):
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Syntax
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Subject Language(s):
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English
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Director(s):
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Herbert Brekle
Roswitha Fischer
Edgar Schneider
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Abstract:
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Preposition placement in English has attracted a great deal of attention in
the linguistic literature since many syntactic contexts license two
competing structural variants (cf. Pullum and Huddleston 2002.
'Prepositions and prepositional phrases'. In: Geoffrey K. Pullum and Rodney
Huddleston, eds. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 627.): in preposed, interrogative, exclamative
and wh-relative clauses the preposition can either be 'stranded', i.e.
appear without an adjacent NP complement (3.1) or occur 'pied piped', i.e.
in clause-initial position (3.2):
(3.1)
a. [Stranding] I've heard of.
b. [What] is he talking about?
c. [What a great topic] he talked about!
d. the structure [[which] he talked about].
(3.2)
a. [Of stranding] I've heard.
b. [About what] is he talking?
c. [About what a great topic] he talked!
d. the structure [[about which] he talked].
Non-wh-relative clauses (3.3a), comparative (3.3b), hollow (3.3c) and
passive clauses (3.3d), however, only permit stranding:
(3.3)
a. the structure [(that) he talked about].
b. the same stuff as [I talked about].
c. His thesis was easy [to find fault with].
d. Stranding has been talked about enough.
The present thesis attempts to investigate the distribution of preposition
pied piping and stranding in all clause types. In order to distinguish
language-specific form general linguistic constraints it does so by drawing
on empirical corpus and experimental data for L1 British English BE as well
as L2 Kenyan English KenE. Finally, it attempts to provide a full account
of preposition placement in both varieties within the framework of
construction grammar.
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