영어 전치사 좌초

Preposition Stranding in English

The purpose of this study is to point out that the problem of preposition stranding cannot be adequately explained in syntactic terms, and presents an alternative functional explanation in terms of the concept of more important information. Linguists have proposed syntactic analyses to capture the difference between strandable and unstrandable prepositions. Hornstein and Weinberg(1981) claim that preposition stranding can be explained by using a filter preventing an empty category from receiving an oblique case together with the concept of reanalysis. Chomsky(1981) proposes the empty category principle and explains movement. His principle accounts for the asymmetry between the movement from the subjects and objects of embedded sentences. But Hornstein and Weinberg(1981) and Chomsky(1981) cannot account for the preposition stranding produced by the preposition phrases directly dominated by sentences and adjoined to verb phrases. On the other hand, Chomsky(1986) accounts for movement by using the concept of barriers without resorting to the reanalysis. But he also cannot explain many preposition stranding phenomena. As an alternative to syntactic analyses, a functional explanation is offered in this study. It is shown that whether a preposition can be stranded or not is mainly dependent upon whether a prepositional phrase functionally carries more important information than the remaining elements of the sentence. It is observed that the more important information condition can capture: (ⅰ)strandability of a large number of prepositions, some of which have not been explained in the syntactic analyses; (ⅱ) the fact that the acceptability could change according to the choice of the verbs or the degree of specificity of the wh-phrases even though the same preposition is used; and, (ⅲ)the fact that preposition stranding is also largely due to context or the speaker/ hearer s background information. It is hoped that the more important information condition will be extended to apply to other grammatical phenomena.