world Englishes, Vol. 8. No. 2, pp. 229-238. 1989. 0883-2919/89 13.00 + O.

IM
printed in Great Britain. Pergamon Press plc

Prepositions in American and British English

DIETER MINDT* and CHRISTEL WEBER*

ABSTRACT: The aim of this paper is to compare the distribution of prepositions in American and
British English. Two machine-readable 1 million word corpora, the BROWN Corpus of American
English and the LOB Corpus of British English are used as a basis of comparison. The prepositions
that occur in both American and British English account for more than 99% of all the occurrences
of prepositions in both corpora. Moreover, the distribution of the six most commonly used
prepositions (representing more than 70% of all the occurrences of prepositions in both corpora)
is almost identical in American and British English. As far as prepositions are concerned, there
is on the whole a very close distributional correspondence between British and American English.

INTRODUCTION
Studies of linguistic variation are very frequent. For ELT on the other hand, especially
for teaching English for purposes of world-wide communication, it is of prime importance
to know what are the common features of the different varieties of English. Successful
communication between speakers using different varieties of English depends on the features
that are shared by the different varieties.
Prepositions are part of the core of the English language. About every eighth word in
contemporary English texts is a preposition. Prepositions are indicators of local, temporal,
causal, modal and a number of other relations. In the course of the history of the English
language, prepositions have in addition taken over the role of case endings. In this role
they are used to indicate case relations by which noun phrases are assigned certain syntactic
functions which correspond to a number of well-defined semantic roles at the level of the
clause.
The aim of this paper is to look at the question of how much correspondence there is
in the distribution of prepositions in British and American English. At the same time distinct
areas of difference in the distribution of prepositions in British and American English can
be pointed out.
The empirical basis of this investigation are two machine-readable corpora of English,
each comprising 1 million words: the BROWN Corpus' of American English and the LOB
Corpus2 of British English. The LOB Corpus is a British counterpart of the BROWN
Corpus. Because of the identity in text type selection both corpora provide a good basis
for a comparison of the two varieties of English.

PREPOSITIONS IN AMERICAN ENGLISH (BROWN CORPUS)

The distribution of prepositions in American English is documented in Francis and Kutera
(1982). Prepositions are marked by the tag IN in the BROWN Corpus.
Unfortunately the tagging of the BROWN Corpus which was performed by hand was
not carried out consistently. Problems arise for the so-called complex prepositions like in

*Institut fur Sprach- und Literaturdidaktik, Freie Universitat Berlin, Habelschwerdter Allee 45, D-1000Berlin
33, FRG.

229
230 Dieter Mindt and Christel Weber

front oft in spite of etc. In most cases these prepositions are marked in the following way:
in-IN front-" of-IN or in-IN spite-" of-", where IN is the tag for a noun.
Generally speaking, the non-prepositional constituent of a complex preposition does not
bear the prepositional tag IN in the BROWN Corpus.
This general procedure was, however, not applied consistently. There are 156 occurrences
of the complex preposition in spite of in BROWN. In 148 cases spite was tagged as a noun
(NN), in eight cases as a preposition (IN). Similar inconsistencies were found with rather
(1 19 occurrences bearing the tag IN in the combination rather than), next (42 occurrences
bearing the tag IN in the combination next to), depending (29 occurrences bearing the tag
IN in depending on or depending upon), and consisting (two occurrences bearing the tag
IN in the combination consisting of). In all these cases the first element is not normally
tagged as a preposition in BROWN even if it occurs as a constituent of a complex
preposition.
In order to avoid these inconsistencies we had to exclude spite, rather, next, depending
and consisting from the analysis. For the same reason 128 cases of according had to be
excluded since these cases occur as a constituent of the complex preposition according to
where according would normally be tagged as a verb.
Furthermore there are nine items bearing the tag IN which seem ambiguous to us. We
decided to leave them out of the investigation, because they cannot be safely added to the
word class preposition without a closer inspection of the contexts in which they O C C U ~ . ~
After these preliminary considerations there are 94 prepositions in the BROWN Corpus.
Their frequency of occurrence is 122,149. A rank list compiled from the data presented
by Francis and KuEera (1982) is given in Table 1.
The rank list shows considerable differences in the number of occurrences of the 94
different prepositions in the corpus. For this reason the prepositions were divided into four
groups according to their frequency of occurrence (Table 2).
It is obvious that the core of prepositions in American English is made up of groups 1
and 2. The prepositions in group 1 and group 2 cover 89.19% of all occurrences of the
prepositions in the BROWN Corpus. This means that almost 90% of prepositional usage
in American English is accounted for by 11 prepositions.
Within this central area the two most frequent prepositions, ofand in, account for about
every second occurrence.
Groups 3 and 4 contain marginal prepositions. These groups contain 83 prepositions
altogether. These 83 prepositions account for less than 11% of prepositional usage in
American English.

PREPOSITIONS IN BRITISH ENGLISH (LOB CORPUS)

In order to find out the frequency and distribution of the prepositions in British English
we made a frequency count of the items bearing the tag IN in LOB.'
There are 134 items bearing the tag IN. Of these, 23 items could not be safely identified
as prepositions. For this reason we assigned them to a separate list named 'unclear cases'.
In this list there are items such as wid or as though which require closer inspection before
they can be added to the list of clearly identified prepositions.
The list of unclear cases contains 23 items, whose frequency of occurrence in LOB is
171. The total number of occurrences bearing the tag IN is 124,396. The 171 occurrences
of unclear cases make up 0.14% of all the occurrences of items bearing the tag IN. We
 Prepositions in American and British English 23 1

Table 1. Rank list of prepositions in the BROWN Corpus

Frequency of Frequency of
Preposition occurence Preposition occurence
in BROWN in BROWN
of 36,432 outside 83
in 20,870 inside 81
below 80
beside 78
to 11,165 towards 65
for 8992 concerning 62
with 7286 onto 61
on 6183 past 61
at 5375 beneath 55
by 5244 unlike 42
from 437 I versus 42
into I790 regarding 37
about I242 like 35
besides 31
considering 24
through 91 I opposite 24
over 843 pursuant 20
between 729 plus 17
after 699 via 17
under 688 unto 16
against 625 amid 14
during 588 excluding 13
without 583 following 13
than 497 alongside 10
out 454 underneath 9
upon 45 1 aboard 8
before 407 save 7
toward 386 pending 5
per 370 Pro 5
among 369 amongst 4
within 35 1 minus 4
around 327 round 4
across 258 till 4
behind 230 amidst 3
along 198 astride 3
down 192 atop 3
above 188 involving 3
since 180 nearest 3
UP 179 notwithstanding 3
except 174 post 3
including 166 times 3
beyond 163 nearer 2
off I57 respecting 2
near 156 vis-a-vis 2
throughouIt 133 dell' 1
but 131 excepting 1
until 125 infra I
as 121 inter I
despite 104 with-but-after 1
232 Dieter Mindt and Christel Weber

Table 2. Groups of prepositions in BROWN

Relative Cum u1ative
Range of Number of Absolute frequency frequency
Group frequency prepositions frequency VOO) (%)

Group 1 Over 20,000 2 57,302 46.91 46.91

Group 2 1001-11,ooo 9 5 1,648 42.28 89.19
Group 3 101-1000 34 12,133 9.93 99.12
Group 4 1-100 49 1066 0.87 100.00

therefore felt justified in excluding the unclear cases from the preliminary steps of the
analysis of English prepositions.
This initial count with the exclusion of unclear cases still proved inadequate for a
comparison with BROWN because there is a difference in tag assignment between LOB
and BROWN. It has to be noted that in LOB complex prepositions such as owing to, such
as, thanks to are not tagged in the same way as in BROWN.
In BROWN every constituent of a complex preposition is tagged independently,s
whereas in LOB complex prepositions of this kind are treated as a unit in which every
constituent is assigned the tag I N . The complex preposition owing to is tagged owing-IN
to-IN in LOB, whereas in BROWN owing to is tagged owing-VBG t0-1N.~
For this reason the first part of complex prepositions such as owing to, such as, thanks
to, which are marked by ditto tags in the LOB Corpus were also excluded from the analysis.
The most frequent complex prepositions in the LOB Corpus marked by ditto tags are
such as, because of, according to with the following frequencies: 151, 141, 130. These are
the only complex prepositions marked by ditto tags with more than 100 occurrences in
LOB. The total number of occurrences of complex prepositions marked by ditto tags in
LOB is 1017.
In order to make it possible to compare LOB with the figures presented by Francis and
KuEera (1982) we had to disregard all those constituents of complex prepositions which
do not normally bear the tag IN in BROWN.
After these preliminary considerations it was possible to compile a rank list of the
prepositions in LOB (Table 3). This rank list contains 94 prepositions with a total of 123,387
occurrences.
The rank list of the 94 prepositions makes it possible to distinguish between central and
marginal prepositions. In accordance with the division of prepositions in the BROWN
Corpus the prepositions in LOB were divided into four groups, as shown in Table 4.

COMPARISON OF THE PREPOSITIONS IN AMERICAN AND BRITISH ENGLISH

Overall frequency of prepositions
The overall frequency of prepositions in LOB and BROWN is given in Table 5 . Table
5 shows that there are only slight differences in the total number of occurrences of
prepositions in BROWN and LOB.

Different and identical prepositions

The rank lists make it possible to determine how many of the prepositions that occur
in BROWN and LOB are identical or not.
 Prepositions in American and British English 233

Table 3. Rank list of prepositions in the LOB Corpus

Frequency of Frequency of
occurrence occurrence
Preposition in LOB Preposition in LOB
of 35,287 UP 99
in 20,250 except 97
beside 90
10,876 but 86
to
for 8738 despite 76
with 7170 inside 65
on 625 1 beneath 54
5724 past 52
by times’
at 5473 49
from 4672 amongst 45
as 2804 following 42
into 1658 plus 34
1282 till 32
about
than I020 concerning 30
opposite 25
besides 21
after 929 via 20
like 883 regarding 16
between 858 onto 15
over 770 toward 14
through 68 I unto 14
without 66 I alongside 13
under 620 notwithstanding 12
against 569 nearer I1
during 495 amid 9
before 488 aboard 8
upon 406 considering 8
within 334 underneath 7
towards 317 amidst 5
among 313 respecting 5
behind 25 I save 4
across 230 pending 4
above 192 barring 3
since 181 less 3
along 179 versus 3
down 168 excepting 2
until 151 out 2
near 148 failing 2
round 148 re 2
including 145 touching 2
beyond 143 bar 2
Per 142 afore 1
outside 139 il la 1
around I32 bout 1
off I16 minus 1
worth 104 nearest 1
qua 1
below 99 vice 1
throughout 99 neath 1
234 Dieter Mindt and Christel Weber

Table 4. Groups of prepositions in LOB

Relative Cumulative
Range of Number of Absolute frequency frequency
Group frequency prepositions frequency (To) (TO)

Group I Over 20,000 2 55,537 45.01 45.01

Group 2 1001-1 1,000 11 55,668 45.12 90.13
Group 3 101-1000 30 10,893 8.83 98.96
Group 4 1-100 51 1289 I .04 100.00

Table 5. Occurrences of prepositions in BROWN and LOB

Percentage of
occurrences of
Total number Occurrences of prepositions
of words prepositions (TO)

BROWN 1 ,000,OOo 122,149 12.21

LOB I ,000,000 123,387 12.34

There are 13 prepositions with 98 occurrences that occur in BROWN without having
a counterpart in LOB. These occurrences make up 0.08% of all occurrences of prepositions
in BROWN. Table 6 contains these prepositions together with their frequency of occurrence.

Table 6. Prepositions occurring only

in BROWN
Frequency of
Preposition occurrence

unlike 42
pursuant 20
excluding 13
Pro 5
astride 3
atop 3
involving 3
post 3
vis-his 2
dell’
infra
inter
with-but-after

In LOB there are 13 prepositions with 124 occurrences that do not occur in BROWN.
These occurrences make up 0.10% of all occurrences of prepositions in LOB. Table 7
contains these prepositions together with their frequency of occurrence.
The 13 prepositions (types) that occur in BROWN without having a counterpart in LOB
make up 13.83% of the safely identified prepositions (types) in BROWN. For LOB the
corresponding figures are the same. The 81 prepositions, however, that occur both in
BROWN and LOB make up about 99.9% of all the Occurrences of prepositions in BROWN
and LOB. Thus, in the overwhelming majority of cases there is very close agreement between
BROWN and LOB in the occurrence of important prepositions in both American and British
English. The 81 prepositions that occur both in BROWN and LOB are given in Table 8.
 Prepositions in American and British English 235

Table 7. Prepositions occurring only

in LOB
Frequency of
Preposition occurrence
worth 104
barring 3
less 3
failing 2
re 2
touching 2
bar 2
afore 1
A la 1
bout I
qua 1
vice 1
neath 1

Table 8. Prepositions that occur both in BROWN and LOB, according to their rank order in BROWN

of upon until amid

in before as following
to toward despite alongside
for Per outside underneath
with among inside aboard
on within below save
at around beside pending
by across towards amongst
from behind concerning minus
into along onto round
about down past till
through above beneath amidst
over since versus nearest
bet ween UP regarding notwithstanding
after except like times
under including besides nearer
against beyond considering respecting
during off opposite excepting
without near plus
than throughout via
out but unto

Distribution of central and marginal prepositions

Tables 2 and 4, in which the prepositions are arranged into four groups according to
their frequency of occurrence, provide the necessary data for an analysis of the distribution
of central and marginal prepositions in BROWN and LOB.
The distribution of the prepositions in LOB is very similar to the one found in BROWN.
There is a clear division between groups 1 and 2 on the one hand and groups 3 and 4 on
the other. Two major prepositions in group 1 account for 46.91% of the occurrences in
BROWN. The corresponding figure for the same prepositions in LOB is 45.01%.
In BROWN there are nine prepositions in group 2 (prepositions with a frequency of
occurrence between 1001 and 11,OOO). Their frequency of occurrence in the whole corpus
is 42.28%. In LOB there are 11 prepositions in group 2 with a relative frequency of 45.12%.
236 Dieter Mindt and Christel Weber

Distribution of the most frequent prepositions

For a closer inspection of the distribution of the individual prepositions with a frequency
of 1001 occurrences or more (groups 1 and 2) the figures from BROWN are contrasted
with the figures from LOB in Table 9.

Table 9. Prepositions with a frequency of 1001

occurrences or more in BROWN and LOB
Frequency of Frequency of
occurrence occurrence
Preposition in BROWN in LOB
of 36,432 35,287
in 20,870 20,250

to 11,165 10,876
for 8992 8738
with 7286 7170
on 6183 625 1
at 5375 5413
by 5244 5724
from 437 1 4672
(as) (121) 2804
into 1790 1658
about 1242 1282
(than) (497) 1020

There are the following distributional similarities:

(1) Both in BROWN and LOB there are clearly two very similar groups of prepositions,
with of and in belonging to the first group in both corpora.
(2) The two most frequent prepositions (of and in) have the same rank order in American
and British English.
(3) The rank order of the four following prepositions (to,for, with, on) is also identical.
(4) The application of the chi-square test leads to the result that there are no significant
differences in the distribution of the two most frequent prepositions in LOB and
BROWN (of and in): Chi-square = 0.02, df = 1, 0.05 = 3.84.*
(5) For the six most frequently used prepositions in LOB and BROWN there is also
no significant difference in distribution: Chi-square = 5.44, df = 5, 0.05 = 1 1.07.
The six most frequent prepositions in BROWN have an occurrence of 90,928, which means
that they cover 74.44% of the occurrences of the clearly identified prepositions in BROWN.
The same six most frequent prepositions in LOB have an occurrence of 88,572. They
cover 7 1.78% of all the occurrences of prepositions in LOB.
Except for the prepositions given in Table 9 there is no preposition in BROWN with
a frequency of occurrence exceeding 1001 so that in this respect there is also a very close
correspondence between British and American English.
There are, however, striking differences between BROWN and LOB for the prepositions
us and than, which occur in tenth and thirteenth position in LOB. Their frequency in
BROWN is so low that they could be assigned to neither group 1 nor to group 2. This
seems to be due to a difference in tagging procedures rather than to a difference of
 Prepositions in American and British English 237

prepositional use in American and British E n g l i ~ hThis

. ~ is supported by very similar
figures for the overall frequencies of us and than in BROWN and LOB.*O

CONCLUSION
There is hardly any difference in the total number of occurrences of prepositions in
American and British English (Table 5). 12.21% of all the words in the BROWN Corpus
(American English) are prepositions. The corresponding figure for LOB (British English)
is 12.34%.
There are 81 prepositions that occur both in BROWN and LOB. These 81 prepositions
(see Table 8) make up about 99.9% of all the occurrences of prepositions in BROWN and
LOB. Thus, in the overwhelming majority of cases there is a very close correspondence in
the occurrence of prepositions in both American and British English.
The distribution of the most frequent prepositions in American and British English is
almost identical. The six most frequent prepositions (of, in, to, for, with, on) have the
same rank order in American and British English. Statistically, no significant difference
can be found for the distribution of these six prepositions in BROWN and LOB. These
prepositions account for 74.44% of the occurrences of the clearly identified prepositions
in BROWN and 71.78% of the occurrences of prepositions in LOB.
On the whole, there is a very close correspondence between British and American English
with regard to the distribution of prepositions. The functional core of the English language
which is represented by the prepositions seems to be largely identical irrespective of other
differences between British and American English.

NOTES

1. The BROWN Corpus was compiled by Henry Kuhra and W. Nelson Francis at Brown University in
1963-1964. For further details see Francis and Kutera (1964).
2. The LOB Corpus was compiled at Lancaster University, at the University of Oslo and at the Norwegian
Computing Centre for the Humanities in Bergen by Geoffrey Leech, Stig Johansson and Knut Hofland
in 1970-1977. For further details see Johansson et 01. (1978).
3. The following items were left out of the investigation for American English: foh, fur. oft, fer, beefore.
behohn, bi, uppon, cepting. Francis and Kuhra list foh and fur under the lemma for etc. We therefore
deducted the number of tokens of foh and fur from the absolute frequency given for the lemma for by
Francis and KuEera. The other items were dealt with respectively. For this reason the absolute number of
prepositions in the BROWN Corpus is not identical with the total numbers given in Francis and KuEera (1982).
4. For this frequency count we applied the program package COCOA to the tagged version of the LOB Corpus.
5. For inconsistencies in the tagging of the BROWN Corpus see above.
6. In the LOB Corpus tag sequences for complex prepositions such as owing-IN to-IN are called ‘ditto tags’.
7. Forty-two of these cases occur with the spelling ‘x’.
8. We use the following notational convention: ‘Chi-square’ stands for the empirical chi-square value, ‘df‘
stands for the number of degrees of freedom, ‘0.05’ gives the critical value at the significancelevel alpha = 0.05.
For 2 x 2 contingency tables we use the chi-square test corrected for continuity (Siege], 1956: 109).
9. Personal communication by Nelson W. Francis and Henry KuCera at the Ninth International I.C.A.M.E.
conference on computerised corpora (Birmingham, May 1988).
10. The total frequency of all occurrences of us in LOB is 7337, and 7254 in BROWN. For rhon there are 1646
occurrences in LOB and 1794 in BROWN. This confirms the view that the difference is due to differences
in tag assignment.
238 Dieter Mindt and Christel Weber

REFERENCES

Francis, W. Nelson and KuEera, Henry (1964,1979)Manual of Information to Accompany a Standard Sample
of Present-day Edited American English, for Use with Digital Computers. Providence, RI: Department of
Linguistics, Brown University.
Francis, W. Nelson and KuEera, Henry (1982)Frequency Analysis of English Usage: Lexicon and Grammar.
Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.
Johansson, Stig, Leech, Geoffrey and Goodluck, Helen (1978)Manualof Irlformationto Accompany thehncmter-
Oslo/Bergen Corpus of British English, for Use with DigitalComputers,Oslo: Department of Enghsh, University
of Oslo.
Siege], Sidney (1956)Nonparametric Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences. New York: McGraw-Hill.

(Received 2 December 1988,)