Beyond the noun postmodifier: prepositional phrases preceded by nouns in spoken and written academic English.

Abstract

This study seeks to investigate variation in the use of prepositional phrases following noun phrases in spoken and written academic English. In order to do so, the British Academic Written English (BAWE) Corpus and the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) Corpus were used. The results of this analysis have revealed that there is a specific set of prepositions that control prepositional phrases (of, in, to, for). Nevertheless, contrary to previous studies the findings of this investigation show that prepositional phrases following nouns are more common in spoken registers than written registers. These results might be an indicator of different levels of expertise, or the use of genitives in spoken registers.