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This paper reports on a research project investigating prepositional phrases in verbal argument structure patterns in the history of English: Prepositional marking as a more analytic means of expression presumably increased in use over time (concurrent to a loss of morphological case marking and fixation of constituent order), with prepositions gradually taking on more grammatical, ‘core’ complement functions, such as e.g. recipient marking (Fennell 2001; Baugh & Cable 2002; Hawkins 2012; Szmrecsanyi 2012, 2016). The paper then presents a large dataset drawn from the well-known Penn-Parsed Corpora of Historical English (ca. 1150-1900; Kroch et al. 2000, 2004, 2010) and selected case studies on these developments. It highlights (a) general methodological challenges incurred by working with historical corpora, such as abundant spelling variation and limited corpus sizes (e.g. Trips & Percillier 2020), and (b) the specific methodological and challenges of dealing with the diachrony of prepositional phrases in English. I show that PPs – and especially PPs in historical data – are problematic in that e.g. distinguishing different types (adjuncts vs complements) or different semantic roles of PPs is a non-trivial task for manual classification, but also for more data-driven, automated ways of analysis based on recent developments in NLP (e.g. Merlo & Ferrer 2006; Hovy et al. 2010; Huang et al. 2020). Among other things, the paper outlines a pilot study of PP-classification making use of MacBERTh, an LLM pre-trained on historical English data (Manjavacas & Fonteyn 2022). Finally, I discuss how such methodological challenges and approaches can then inform (or are in turn informed by) theoretical assumptions about language change in general, and the development of English PPs in particular (see e.g. Hoffmann 2007 and Bergs 2021 for constructionist approaches to Present Day English PP-patterns).
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