ABSTRACT
Modern English has numerous examples of verb-preposition collocations which appear to act as units as far as their complementation is concerned. The most striking manifestation is the prepositional passive, where the subject of the passive corresponds to the object of a preposition in the active. The history of the prepositional passive is closely bound up with the history of preposition stranding. Preposition stranding is also freer in modern English than in most other European languages. Verb conjunction may be one of the sign of the formation of a prepositional verb. Various stranding constructions apart from the prepositional passive make their first appearance in Middle English. The non-subject contact clause is very rare in Old English but more common in Middle English, and for that reason alone it may be that stranding patterns in contact clauses first appear in Middle English.
