Reflexivity in English Prepositional Phrases

Abstract

This paper is a corpus analysis of personal pronouns versus self-forms in American English locally bound prepositional phrases. Sentences containing a preposition immediately followed by a locally bound proform were taken from the tagged Brown Corpus (1979). For each locally bound prepositional phrase a number of semantic properties were indexed: meaningful, belief report, picture noun phrase, partitive, locative and/or directional. Statistical analyses showed that the choice of proform used per preposition varied significantly, and that the choice of proform used per semantic category as defined by Lederer (2009) (locative, directional and grammatical) varied significantly. These variations could not be attributed to any single semantic property. Future research should concentrate on the semantic categories per proform for each preposition.