Main features of English predicative prepositional phrases in ICE-GB

This paper is aimed at identifying which are the main characteristics of those English prepositional phrases which perform the function of subject complement in the British component of ICE. Such is the case of "She first fell in love with Will when she was eighteen, and she adores him still" (ICE-GB:W2F-019 #47:1 ). After introducing the notions of prepositional phrase and subject complement, these structures will be described from the morphological, syntactic, semantic, lexical, and socio-pragmatic points of view and examples will be provided. Although in terms of frequency this is not the syntactic function prepositional phrases more often perform, they are taken into account because of their complexity and due to the lack of detailed analyses. In most cases they are described as isolated examples and this phenomenon is not considered to be a very productive one. Morphologically speaking, prepositional phrases can be defined as those phrases headed by a preposition which requires another unit following it and acting as its complement. Even though there is a wide range of units that can perform the function of complement of a preposition, attention will only be paid to noun phrases. They can be very simple (consisting of a single noun, as "on fire") or more complex (for instance, "in the pink of health"). From the syntactic point of view, prepositional phrases usually perform the functions of adverbial, postmodifier of noun phrases and complement of adjective and prepositional phrases. Nevertheless, they can also behave as subject and object complements: "That is of no importance" (Quirk et alii, 1985: 732) and "I don't consider myself at risk" (op.cit.: 733). As far as semantics is concerned, when acting as subject and object complements, prepositional phrases convey meanings which are similar to those of adjectives, since they express qualities or characteristics. Thus "on cloud nine" and "in the doldrums" can be replaced by "very happy" and "depressed", respectively. Lexically speaking, some of the examples under analysis are idiomatic, their meaning being metaphorical. Such is the case of "(be) on tenterhooks", which is defined as follows in OALD6 (1340) as "(to be) very anxious or excited while you are waiting to find out sth or see what will happen". More information is provided as regards its origin: "From tenterhook, a hook which in the past was used to keep material stretched on a drying frame during manufacture". As far as socio-pragmatics is concerned, sometimes these structures are selected because they allow speakers to express the same meaning by means of a lower number of words. This is the case of "in hand", defined as "receiving attention and being dealt with" (OALD5: 537). Moreover, many of these structures are labelled as "colloquial", "informal", "old-fashioned", or "slang" in dictionaries. In sorne cases they can even convey two different meanings, one being neutral and the other, informal; the phrase "on the job" in OALD6 (697), is thus defined as "while doing a particular job" and "(BrE, slang) Having sex".