IN Prepositions

Biber I39 Xiao F77 MFTE IN MFTE INother Bohmann 158

Definition

Prepositions (residual count after removing specific subcategories).

Detection Rules

Uses cat refinement for THSC, COND, CUZ, LIKE (all have refines: IN). CONC needs explicit exclusion (crosses POS boundaries). SO default rule only refines RB, not IN, so it doesn’t affect this default rule.

cql[cat="IN"]
combine: _ & !CONC

Requires: pos

mfte

MFTE converts all remaining TO → IN (line 1234) after to-clause features have been tagged. So IN = original IN + remaining TO, minus features that REPLACE IN-tagged tokens: subordinators (THSC, COND, CONC, CUZ), plus LIKE and SO “bin” features. Note: MFTE removed Biber’s OSUB/OTHADVSUB category entirely (Le Foll comment, line 1082); while→CC is handled separately; most “as” subordinators stay as IN. CAUSE and ELAB do not overlap with IN-tagged tokens in practice.

cql[pos="IN|TO"]
combine: _ & !THSC & !COND & !CONC & !CUZ & !LIKE & !SO

Requires: pos

pybiber

semgrex{dep:prep}

Requires: pos, dep

Normalization

Per words

Sources

  • biber_1988 — Biber, Douglas (1988) : Variation across Speech and Writing
  • mfte — Le Foll, Elen & Shakir, Muhammad (2023/2025) : Multi-Feature Tagger of English (MFTE) — Python version
  • pybiber — Brown, David West & Reinhart, Alex (2026) : pybiber — Python package for linguistic feature extraction and Multi-Dimensional Analysis
  • xiao_2009 — Xiao, Richard (2009) : Multidimensional analysis and the study of world Englishes
  • bohmann_2019 — Bohmann, Axel (2019) : Variation in English Worldwide: Varieties and Genres in a Quantitative Perspective

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