Preposition Placement: Minimalist Program vs Construction Grammar (Hoffmann)

In my PhD thesis Preposition Placement: Minimalist Program vs Construction Grammar, two competing syntactic theories (Minimalist Program and Construction Grammar) will be evaluated with respect to their analyses of preposition placement in first (British English) and second (East African English) language varieties of English. Topics which I address include: How well do both theories handle the phenomenon for first language varieties? Which is the better model for second language varieties? In general: Is there a single theory that gives the empirically best analysis of preposition placement for first and second languages?

As I have argued in my latest publications (cf. the fc. section of my publication list), syntacticians should not limit themselves to a single data source. Instead I have advocated the idea of “corroborating evidence”: the use of both corpus and introspection data in order to increase the descriptive adequacy of one’s analysis. For my PhD project I therefore use data extracted from representative corpora (the British and the East African component if the International Corpus of English project) together with introspection data collected via experimental studies (mostly using the Magnitude Estimation method). 

Contact details: 

Prof. Dr. Thomas Hoffmann,

Institute for English and American Studies, University of Osnabrück