An empirical perspective on the contact between English and French: a case study on substitutive complex prepositions

Historical language contact has generally been approached qualitatively through the examination of different linguistic and extralinguistic factors. By contrast, frequency patterns, although widely acknowledged in other linguistic fields, have not received a great deal of attention in the contact linguistics literature. This paper attempts to bridge this methodological gap through the application of an experimental procedure borrowed from the field of learner corpus research and areal linguistics. In a pilot study on the well-known case of language contact between English and French, the potential contact effects of French on English with regard to the use of substitutive complex prepositions of the PNP type are investigated, using probabilistic multifactorial modeling. The goal is to show in what ways and to what extent English conforms to French in the use of in lieu of and in place of, but also the extent to which it deviates from the Romance language, assuming from the outset that French served as the model language. This approach to historical language contact methodologically enriches an ever-growing paradigm and also illustrates empirically what has been conceptualized as frequency effects in usage-based Construction Grammar.