The Research Group in Syntax & Morphology (Research Programme in Language Sciences; School of Communication & Culture; Aarhus University) is pleased to announce the second of two guest lectures by:

Laura Bailey (Univ. of Kent) https://linguistlaura.wordpress.com/ & https://www.kent.ac.uk/cultures-languages/people/1707/bailey-laura,

Preposition omission in English, or why you can’t walk the museum

Preposition-dropping, or omission of the preposition to in phrases such as I’m going shops, is common in varieties of English. In this talk, I present the results of a study on this phenomenon in Southeast England, and show that it is restricted to a) familiar nouns; b) the verbs come and go; c) the preposition to; d) a directional Goal argument; e) bare nouns. In other words, I’m going shops is fine but *I’m walking the museum is not. Interestingly, this set of restrictions exactly parallels that of (standard) Greek, and overlaps with the restrictions on different German varieties, but differs in some significant ways from some other varieties of English (Myler 2013, Biggs 2015). We’ll explore these differences and why the Englishes are not more similar to each other than to other languages, offering an analysis based on the decomposition of the prepositional phrase. I conclude by introducing current work on bare noun objects, as in I’m gonna get job, and suggest some links between the two constructions.