Dr Laura Bailey, Lecturer in the Department of English Language & Linguistics, has published an article on ‘The Mystery of the Missing Prepositions‘ in the latest issue of the magazine Babel, Issue 23, dated May 2018.
Babel is a quarterly magazine dedicated to cutting-edge linguistic research, exploring languages from around the world, the past, present and future of language, and the many different uses of linguistics in our lives.
‘A common hazard of being a linguistics lecturer is that people complain about linguistics changes they’ve noticed. Most of the time, they think these are mistakes and changes for the worse, but in fact they almost always reveal something interesting about the mechanisms behind verbal and written communication,’ Laura explains in the article. ‘By identifying linguistic shifts, I can find examples and probe the nature of the changes in progress and unpick what’s going on underneath.’
Laura goes on to talk about two examples where prepositions are missing from non-standard English varieties: the new ‘because+noun’ and its particular usage online, and the exclusion of prepositions in a traditional informal English sense (e.g. ‘I’m going pub’). She argues that these missing words can reveal structural properties of language and that case marking (normally all-but-invisible in English) is the crucial link.
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www.babelzine.com