Grammar, Rhetoric and Usage in English

This detailed, corpus-based study shows how the placement and usage of the English preposition has changed since the sixteenth century.

Explores the preposition in English, and particularly how its placement in a sentence is influenced by both syntactic and sociolinguistic constraints. This detailed, corpus-based study shows how such issues have affected the placement and usage of the English preposition since the sixteenth century.The preposition is of particular interest to syntacticians, historians and sociolinguists of English, as its placement within a sentence is influenced by syntactic and sociolinguistic constraints, and by how the 'rules' regarding prepositions have changed over time, as a result of language change, of change in attitudes towards language, and of processes such as standardization. This book investigates preposition placement in the early and late Modern English periods (1500–1900), with a special focus on preposition stranding (The house which I live in) in opposition to pied piping (The house in which I live). Based on a large-scale analysis of precept and usage data, this study reassesses the alleged influence of late eighteenth-century normative works on language usage. It also sheds new light on the origins of the stigmatisation of preposition stranding. This study will be of interest to scholars working on syntax and grammar, corpus linguistics, historical linguistics and sociolinguistics.