Simulación condiciones críticas

This is not to say that specific prepositions, lexical strings, and their collocational strength are irrelevant to preposition placement. On the opposite, there is evidence to suggest that preposition placement depends on the individual behavior of specific lexical items and strings of lexical items. Anecdotal evidence and examples are scat-tered across the literature (Bergh & Seppänen, 2000; C. Johansson & Geisler, 1998;

Quirk et al., 1985; Trotta, 2000). On the one hand, with some prepositions only fronting is acceptable. For example, the prepositions besides, except, during, since, throughout, beyond, and underneath have been noted to require fronting, whereas stranding them is not acceptable. This is illustrated in Example 42.

Example 42

a. limitations beyond which it is not possible to go (BNC) b. *limitations which it is not possible to go beyond

While fronting beyond is acceptable (42a), stranding it is not (42b), despite the typical stranding context of a wh-RC with a participant filler, pronominal RC sub-ject, inanimate head nominal, verbal gap site, and a lexicalized prepositional verb go beyond. Some researchers assume that the length and usage frequency of the preposition are responsible for individual placement preferences, with shorter and more frequent prepositions favoring stranding (Gries, 2002; Quirk et al., 1985). For example, Quirk et al. claimed that “it is the most common and the short preposi-tions which can be [stranded], in particular spatial preposipreposi-tions” (1985, p. 664). By way of illustration, consider Example 43.

Example 43 (Quirk et al., 1985, p. 664)

a. the car he left his coat in

b. *the election results he left politics because of

According to the authors, stranding is acceptable with common and short spatial preposition like in (43a), but sounds odd with uncommon and long prepositions like because of (43b). Moreover, a number of head nouns induces fronting and excludes stranding, for example, way, extent, point, sense, degree, time, and moment. More recently, Hoffmann (2011) subjected adverbial RCs to a collostructional analysis and found significant associations between fronting and strings like way in, ease with, speed with, frequency with, period for, rate of, extent to, amount by, and degree to, some of which are illustrated in Example 44.

3.4. ITEMS, STRINGS, AND SPEAKERS 87

Example 44 (Hoffmann, 2011, p. 164)

a. the ways in which the satire is achieved

b. the ease with which the Saxons overran lowland England c. the speed with which rainforests are being felled

From a usage-based point of view, this suggests that items and strings which are frequently encountered in fronting RCs have been incorporated through rein-forcement into the emerging item-specific construction. Moreover, strings of specific head nominals and prepositions have been lexicalized and fused into chunks which are activated and processed holistically. As a consequence, the preposition imme-diately follows the head nominal, resulting in preposition fronting. In contrast, Jespersen (1927, p. 189) argued that head nominals and prepositions form meaning units in adverbial RCs. Stranding prepositions would then produce a discontinuous constituent which is difficult to process and interpret and is therefore avoided.

On the other hand, with some items and strings stranding is the favored choice.

Biber et al. (1999) noted that “[f]orms which are typically used as stranded prepo-sitions are those which are closely linked to a preceding word” (1999, p. 106). In particular, prepositions which are part of prepositional verbs, adjectives, and id-iomatic multi-word expressions strongly tend to be stranded, for example, confide in, rely on, capable of, familiar with, get rid of, and do away with, respectively. In line with this, Jespersen pointed out that sometimes “the preposition is naturally placed at the end of the clause, because it is felt to be less intimately connected with the relative than with some verb or other word in the clause” (1927, p. 185).

This is illustrated with wh-questions in Example 45.

Example 45 (Biber et al., 1999, p. 106)

a. Who are you looking for?

b. Who do you hang around with?

c. What else can we depend on?

Since the prepositions for, with, and on are bound in the sense that they form a lexicalized unit with the preceding item, they preserve adjacency by stranding.

The hypothesis is tentatively supported by results by Hoffmann (2011) and Gries (2002), indicating that the odds of stranding increase with the collocational strength of the item-preposition strings in a stranding question or RC. However, the associative measures employed in both studies were rather coarse-grained. Gries

distinguished between a handful of verb types depending on the assumed collo-cational strength of verb and preposition, for example, prepositional and phrasal-prepositional verbs, intransitive and transitive verbs. Similarly, Hoffmann intuitively included item-preposition strings with different degrees of lexicalization like prepo-sitional verbs (e.g., rely on), multi-word expressions (e.g., let go of ), and locative verbs (e.g., go to) in his complement-adjunct continuum. Moreover, there is ten-tative evidence from experimental studies to suggest that language users are more likely to strand prepositions when they perceive them as belonging to the RC verb.

For example, in a follow-up task to her grammaticality rating and correction task, Kao (2001) asked a different group of Japanese learners of English to divide the predicates of sentences involving prepositional verbs, adjectives, and phrasal verbs into two groups of words, for example, The student is worrying about the exam. At least a part of the participants grouped the prepositions with the preceding item (here, worrying about), suggesting that they perceived them as units. This might plausibly be expected to lead to stranding in RCs.

From a usage-based perspective, the effect of collocation strength on prepo-sition placement is the result of combining frequent item-prepoprepo-sition strings into automated processing units, with the likelihood of stranding increasing with the collocational strength of a string. In contrast, Hawkins reasoned that since the prepositions in prepositional verbs depend to a considerable degree on the verb for their interpretation and processing, “the ratio of stranding to [fronting] in English should be proportional to the degree of dependency between [verb] and [preposi-tion]” (1999, p. 260). Similar to Jespersen, he argued that stranding does not result from chunking frequent item-preposition strings but rather is due to attempts to avoid the emergence of discontinuous constituents which are difficult to parse and would increase processing load.

Some researchers have suggested that stranding is part of a conventionalized pattern in clauses which consist of only the RC subject, the verb to be, and a preposition (Hoffmann, 2011, pp. 137–141). This is illustrated in Example 46.

Example 46 (Hoffmann, 2011, p. 139)

a. Which school were you in?

b. the guy I was with

For example, among the 102 be RCs in Hoffmann’s data, all but three nonnative En-glish examples included stranded prepositions. Of the three exceptions, two included doubled prepositions in both fronted and stranded position. Hoffmann argued that