Collocational Properties of Adpositions in Nepali and English

This paper presents the results of a preliminary investigation into the use of statistical collocation as a method for discovering characteristic properties of grammatical classes (i.e. part-of-speech categories such as noun, adjective, verb, and so on). In particular, the focus of the current investigation is the collocational patterns found around adpositions in English and Nepali. The claim that will be made on the basis of the findings presented here is twofold. Firstly, two primary collocational patterns characterise the category of adposition in English and Nepali. Secondly, these patterns are observable on different adpositions to different degrees. This claim is illustrated with reference to detailed discussion of a subset of the most frequent adpositions in English and Nepali. The paper is organised as follows. §2 presents an overview of the theoretical background to the “quantitative-distributional” method followed here. The method itself, and the data to which it will here be applied, are then detailed (§3). The collocations found for the adpositions under investigation, and a discussion of the patterns that can be detected among those collocations, are presented in §4 (English data) and §5 (Nepali data). The paper concludes with a discussion of these findings (§6) and some comments on possible further developments of this research (§7).