Exercises

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'Prefer to' vs. 'Prefer over'


The following data information is taken from an article which focuses on the various possible prepositions following the verb to prefer. It is based on corpus studies, which have shown that in EModE the verb to prefer could be followed by a wide range of prepositions such as before, above and to. In the late 17th century the latter became the preferential choice, slowly but surely ousting its competitors. In addition to the word to, over has become a commonly used preposition in combination with the verb to prefer, in present day English (cf. Rohdenburg and Schlüter 2006).

In the following exercise you will be given a token file, consisting of data gathered from a present-day newspaper database, which is comprised of individual instances in which the verb 'to prefer' either occurs with to or over. Your task will be to investigate the linguistic variable, the preposition following to prefer, in regards to its two possible variants to and over. The additional factors which occur in the individual linguistic contexts and which therefore must be taken into account as the independent variables are categorized as follows: there are three factor groups, namely time, voice, and variety, which are respectively categorized into earlier years (e) vs. later years (l), active (a) vs. passive (p), and American English (A) vs. British English (B). Before beginning with your analysis, note which results are to be expected according to the literature. The category American English within the factor group variety is likely to favor the variant over more than its counterpart, British English. Furthermore, the literature predicts that the variant over is consistently expanding in both varieties and that it is far more common to be used in passive constructions (cf. Rohdenburg and Schlüter 2009). Now, run your data through the variable rule program as explained above or visit the online manual for additional instructions and try to answer the following questions:


  1. Are there any errors in my data?
  2. How can I remove them, in order to come up with the best fit of the model to my data?
  3. What information can be gathered from my findings?
  4. What does it mean?
  5. Try to illuminate linguistic and extralinguistic processes.
  6. Does my interpretation of my results coincide with what is predicted in the literature?




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