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Category: Project

Description: The current study investigated how verb-preposition collocations’ phrasal frequency and collocational strength influence preposition placement in wh-relative clauses from a usage-based perspective. Native English speakers, Chinese learners of English as a second language (ESL) at the intermediate and advanced English proficiencies completed a sentence completion task and an acceptability judgment task. The results showed that native and non-native speakers had an overall preference for preposition stranding. Native speakers had a stronger acceptance of preposition pied-piping than non-native speakers; advanced learners had a stronger acceptance of pied-piping than intermediate learners. The collocational strengths of verb-prepositions had a significant effect on the productive use and acceptability of preposition placement for both native speakers and advanced learners. Intermediate learners’ preposition placement was more affected by phrasal frequency. Overall, the findings confirm that the distributional properties of verb-preposition collocations influence speakers’ preference for the type of wh-clause structure, which provides strong support to the usage-based account of grammar analysis and grammar acquisition.