Prepositional phraseological patterns in Czech and English (original) (raw)
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ITRW on Experimental …, 2006
In this study, the use of most frequent spatial prepositions in English, Polish, Swedish, and Russian is analyzed. The prepositions and their contexts are extracted from corpora by means of concordance tools. The collostructional strength between the prepositions and the most frequent nouns in the PPs (Gries et al. 2005) is then computed in order to get a more detailed picture of the contexts in which a given preposition is most likely to appear. The results of the investigation are then analysed within the framework of cognitive semantics, especially Croft and Cruse's (2004) taxonomy of construal operations, and Talmy's (2005) classification of spatial images.
The paper analyses Polish learners' mistakes in English prepositional constructions -one of the most arduous areas of grammar for both the learner and the teacher. An attempt is made to classify the errors and arrive at their underlying causes. The regularities revealed point to interference from the L1 (further subdivided to cover discrepancies between different corresponding prepositions in the L1 and L2 and s tructures which lack a preposition in one language but not in the other; regularities are also observed when analysing the range of prepositional meanings and the frequency of error occurrences in constructions involving them), intralanguage transfer, and the students' way of perceiving the situation they are depicting. Some insight is given into learners' strategies of coping with constructions whose correctness they cannot be certain of. The paper concludes with providing a handful of guidelines which, to the author's belief, will facilitate successful teaching of not only prepositional constructions in any language context.
On corpus-driven research of complex adverbial prepositions with spatial meaning in Czech
Jazykovedný Časopis, 2021
Complex adverbial prepositions with spatial meaning have not been sufficiently studied so far in Czech. To establish a set of these expressions in their actual usage, the resources of the Czech National Corpus were used in this study. The research has shown that the SYN2020 corpus is a relevant tool for searching for two-word expressions with a LOCATIVE ADVERB-SIMPLE PREPOSITION structure that have the same function as a one-word locative preposition. The article describes a method for the extraction of these expressions from the corpus, as well as a method for the collection of their quantitative data using corpus tools. As a result of the research, a list of expressions that are presumably complex prepositions is provided.
Slavia Occidentalis
This article examines the increase in frequency of use of the prepositional noun cases in Czech over the last three decades (1990-2019). The author has based his research on the Czech National Corpus where he created five temporally defined subcorpora containing only journalistic texts from the major Czech daily newspapers. Over the period under study, the share of prepositional cases in the total noun tokens has increased from 26.44% to 28.08% (by 1.64%). The share of cases with proper prepositions has increased the most, while the number of cases with improper prepositions has increased less. The author has identified developmental trends for specific frequented prepositions. According to the author, the increase in the frequency of prepositional cases in Czech is a phenomenon rooted in the “typological dispositions” of the Czech language. However, he considers the stylistic factor (the desire for more explicit, precise expression) to be a factor of more importance, contributing to the increase in the frequency of prepositional cases. On the other hand, some changes in the frequency of use of specific cases, most notably the observed greater frequency of the accusative (+2.21%), are a purely typologically motivated developmental change.
Revista Electrónica Educare , 2021
This essay focuses on a description of the complexities of Prepositional Phrases (PPs) and their challenges for EFL learners. The rationale is to raise language awareness of the multifaceted nature of the PP in teachers and students. The grammatical explanations offered in the literature review are based on Functional Grammar. Moreover, previous research conducted addressing the issues of EFL learners facing problems with PPs are proposed in four configurations: semantic, syntactic, lexical and socio-cultural. Such configurations address scenarios for the identification of multiple meanings, different syntactic functions and structures, regional variations, typology, formal and informal language usage, among others, which represent obstacles and difficulties in the comprehension of the topic by EFL learners. Finally, we conclude that the limited use of syntactic functions, poor internal configuration of PPs, as well as the high frequency of errors reported by previous research indicate PPs are complex to use. Thereby, explicitly reinforcing the teaching of all the configurations of PPs is suggested.
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This study examined the acquisition of preposition placement in English as a second language from a usage-based perspective. German and Chinese learners of English and English native speakers rated the acceptability of English oblique wh relative clauses in a magnitude estimation task. Results indicated that acceptability depended on interactions among preposition fronting and stranding, participant group, participants' first language, and their English proficiency. Most importantly, while stranding was more acceptable than fronting across learner groups, fronting was more acceptable to German than to Chinese learners of English. In line with the usage-based approach, input frequency and crosslinguistic similarity appeared to have a significant influence on the acquisition of preposition fronting and stranding in English. These findings are discussed in light of prior usage-based studies pointing to the role of input frequency and similarity in language acquisition as well as in light of recent research on construction learning across languages.
An Overview of Corpus Linguistics Studies on Prepositions
English Language Teaching, 2011
Studies on prepositions have been explored in corpus linguistics. They have been studied in various perspectives mainly in relation to frequency and collocational information. In order to look at the developments of these studies, this paper will focus on the development of sequence of studies of prepositions in three decades as observed by the authors. In keeping up with the developments, this paper will also look into the scenario of English language corpus work in Malaysia. Based on these review, this paper will then further add to this body of knowledge by providing a more tangible and practical applications in dealing with prepositions from the perspectives of the teaching and learning of prepositions.