Between and among: a data-based analysis

Abstract

It is widely accepted that the selection of between or among depends upon the number of participants/objects that follow (i.e., use between with two and use among for more than two), even though there are many exceptions to this rule. The present study presents a better way to account for the systematic use of the two prepositions. Based upon analysis of tokens from the UCLA Oral Corpus and the Brown University Corpus, I suggest that the underlying usage difference between the two prepositions rests upon the distinction between ‘individual’ and ‘collective’. The paper further introduces a step-by-step analysis, from the most local level (i.e., the Word Level) to the Discourse Level, so that learners of the English language can apply the present findings to everyday uses of these prepositions. There are, however, some cases where either preposition can be used without effecting any meaning differences. These cases are found to exhibit the A + B + C + N syntactic construction. In such cases, two primary forces, Register and Prescriptive Rules, may be acting upon native speakers’ selection of one preposition over the other. In other words, the prescriptive rule stated above may be applied by native speakers of English to those few contexts in which either preposition can be used.