Functions of prepositions in the english language

Grammaticalization

While defining the theory of grammaticalization, Heine and Kuteva assert that “it is describe how grammatical forms and constructions arise and develop through space and time, and to explain why they are structured the way they are”¹⁰ (Heine and Kuteva). They propose “a catalogue of parameters for describing and understanding the evolution of grammatical use patterns and categories”. These parameters of grammaticalization are:

1. 
   extension, i.e. the rise of novel grammatical meanings when linguistic expressions are extended to new contexts (context-induced reinterpretation),
   
2. 
   desemanticization (or “semantic bleaching”), i.e. loss (or generalization) in meaning content,
   
3. 
   decategorialization, i.e. loss in morphosyntactic properties characteristic of lexical or other less grammaticalized forms (view in in view of), and
   
4. 
   erosion (or “phonetic reduction”), i.e. loss in phonetic substance (going to - gonna) (Heine and Kuteva)
   

Hoffmann maintains that any use of language, including this particular use of prepositions, “is a reflection of the cognitive processes at work during the production of language”.

The study evolved complex prepositions of their meaning in the transition from simple to complex, cannot be limited to the appearance of new meanings. The frequency at which complex prepositions are used may differ from context to context. While studying British National Corpus (henceforth BNC), Hoffmann made the following table, which contains the most commonly used 30 complex prepositions:

Table 2. The 30 most frequent complex prepositions in the BNC (Hoffmann)¹¹