Synonymous and antonymous predicative prepositional phrases

Abstract

This paper is aimed at analyzing the phenomena of synonymy and antonymy in English predicative pre­positional phrases obtained from the BNC and ICE-GB corpora. These structures can be defined as those phrases which are headed by a preposition whose complement is a noun phrase and which perform the function of subject complement at clause level, that is to say, there is an intensive relationship between the subject and this unit since the latter predicates something of the subject, thus expressing a quality, condition, state, or feature which is attached to the subject. As far as the first group is concerned, attention will be paid to the similarities between these types of phrases regarding their structure, syntax and meaning. That is the case of, for example, out of a job and out of work in "They might all be out of a job if the Factory Commission came and shut the place down" (BNC: AEB 3300) and "Put your head above the parapet in the European Commission and you're out of work <,> (ICE-GB:S2B-040 #105:3:A)", respectively. From the point of view of forrn, the structure of these prepositional phrases consists of "preposition" + "zero article or a"+ "noun". Semantically speaking the above-mentioned examples can be replaced by "unemployed" in these sentences. Nevertheless, from the pragmatic point of view these predicative prepositional and adjective phrases are not completely interchangeable since there are different nuances which are conveyed by the prepositional structures which cannot be found, for instance, in the word ''unemployed". As for the second, it is possible to express the opposite meaning in four main different ways: i) by means of the opposite prepositíon (such is the case of in control vs out of control in "The Iraqis said they had held off all of those attacks and were still in control of the island <,>" (ICE-GB:S2B-018 #67:2:B) and "Yet, at a pest control conference in 1989, scientists were told that four of the majar weed pests of cereals were out of controf' (ICE-GB:W2B-027 #97: l)); ii) by means of the opposite noun (for instance, in order vs in disorder in "What is happening is is [sic] perfectly in order" (ICE-GB:S 1B-051 #16: 1 :C) and "Everything was in disorder, but I could not see that anything had been taken" (BNC:HGS 2995)); iii) by using the opposite adjective (such is the case of general and private in "I used to do criminal work when I was in general practice but I haven't done criminal work now for about four or five years" (BNC:CMS 1397) vs "Most are in prívate practice, though several thousand work in commerce, industry, local and central government" (BNC:HAJ 48)); iv) other processes such as the insertion of the determiner no between the preposition and the noun: "In Germany, most companies are partnerships, rather than quoted companies, and they are exempt from disclosing information which could be of use to competitors" (BNC: AMK 99) vs "In others, central research laboratories produce wonderful results which are of no use to the business" (BNC:K9J 611 ).