Prepositions in American and British English

ABSTRACT: The aim of this paper is to compare the distribution of prepositions in American and British English. Two machine‐readable 1 million word corpora, the BROWN Corpus of American English and the LOB Corpus of British English are used as a basis of comparison. The prepositions that occur in both American and British English account for more than 99% of all the occurrences of prepositions in both corpora. Moreover, the distribution of the six most commonly used prepositions (representing more than 70% of all the occurrences of prepositions in both corpora) is almost identical in American and British English. As far as prepositions are concerned, there is on the whole a very close distributional correspondence between British and American English.