STPR Stranded prepositions
Definition
Prepositions occurring at the end of a clause, separated from their complement (e.g., “the ring he spoke of”, “what are you looking at”).
Detection Rules
Preposition immediately followed by punctuation (clause-final position).
cql[pos="IN"] [pos="[.,:;!?]"]
pybiber
pybiber requires dep_rel == “prep” AND next token’s tag matches ^[[:punct:]]$ (a single punctuation character). In spaCy, only punctuation tokens have single-character POS tags (., ,, :, etc.), so CQL regex pos=”.” (any single char) is equivalent. This excludes multi-char POS tags like -LRB-, HYPH, ``, ’’ which have upos=PUNCT but are not single-character tags.
cql[pos="IN" & dep="prep"] [pos="."]
Normalization
Per finite_verbs
Examples
We’ve got more than can be accounted for.
Source: le_foll_2024
Where is it from?
Source: le_foll_2024
Open the door and let them in.
Source: le_foll_2024
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