Abstract
The topic of the optional use of various grammatical items in English, such as prepositions and complementizers, enjoys a fair amount of attention in the literature (Rohdenburg 1996: 168–70, 2002, 2007: 223–5; Dixon 2005: 257–8 and 299–300; Mair 2006: 130–5; Leech et al. 2009: 193–5; Sellgren 2010, among many others), yet much work remains to be done. To this end, the present study aims to shed light on the matrix verb waste, in the pattern waste + NP + (in/on) + V-ing, where in present-day English the preposition is becoming a rarity. Earlier work on the matrix verb spend in the same pattern (Rohdenburg 1996, 2002, 2007), noted that the preposition, having at one time been a more or less obligatory component, has decreased in frequency over the course of the twentieth century, with AmE at the forefront of this change. This earlier work also noted that, in the vast majority of cases, the NP component falls into one of three semantic categories: expressions of TIME, EFFORT or MONEY, with TIME NPs being less likely than either of the other two to be followed by the preposition today (Rohdenburg 2002: 83, 2007: 225). This point, while interesting, will not be the main focus of the present research.
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References
Electronic corpora
BNC — The British National Corpus
COCA — The Corpus of Contemporary American English
COHA — The Corpus of Historical American English
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© 2015 Paul Rickman
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Rickman, P. (2015). Prepositions and Sentential Complements: the Case of Waste and Spend. In: Höglund, M., Rickman, P., Rudanko, J., Havu, J. (eds) Perspectives on Complementation. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137450067_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137450067_8
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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