This study examined the acquisition of preposition placement in English as a second language from a usage-based perspective. German and Chinese learners of English and English native speakers rated the acceptability of English oblique wh relative clauses in a magnitude estimation task. Results indicated that acceptability depended on interactions among preposition fronting and stranding, participant group, participants' first language, and their English proficiency. Most importantly, while stranding was more acceptable than fronting across learner groups, fronting was more acceptable to German than to Chinese learners of English. In line with the usage-based approach, input frequency and crosslinguistic similarity appeared to have a significant influence on the acquisition of preposition fronting and stranding in English. These findings are discussed in light of prior usage-based studies pointing to the role of input frequency and similarity in language acquisition as well as in light of recent research on construction learning across languages.

German two-way prepositions have long troubled grammar writing. Unlike most other German prepositions, they occur with both accusative and dative case. Their case is difficult to predict and has been attributed to different underlying meaning construals. Recent exploratory corpus studies propose that, in addition, their case depends on multiple co-occurring contextual variables. Following this approach, this study uses multivariate regression and collostructional analysis to investigate what determines the case of two-way prepositions in a large sample of authentic language use. Based on the results, this study then attempts to provide a usage-based description of the case of two-way prepositions. Contrary to expectations, none of the proposed variables had much influence on case, suggesting that the effects observed in the literature only hold for specific contexts. Instead, the results indicated associations of accusative and dative with individual prepositions and specific lexical items in the context. Framed in terms of usage-based construction grammar, this is interpreted as item-specific constructional prototypes that emerge from typical usage patterns and, once established, determine case based on form-meaning overlap with the current context of use. In line with recent usage-based research on grammar, a first attempt is made to describe case as part of a network of associative links between constructions and lexical items.

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Most usage-based research emphasizes the importance of implicit, input-driven learning in naturalistic environments, but recent studies have adopted usage-based grammatical descriptions for instructed learning in classrooms. These descriptions are intended to draw learners’ deliberate attention to relevant usage patterns in the input and thereby support intake. Most of these studies compare usage-based descriptions to other types of descriptions for their efficiency, while little attention has been paid to the ways in which learners understand and apply such descriptions. This study examines what foreign language learners understand of usage-based grammatical descriptions of target structures. In an experimental forced choice task, Chinese learners of German received usage-based descriptions of case structures and then classified target instances in variable contexts. A multivariate regression analysis indicated that choices were influenced by interactions of the type of description with participants’ target-language proficiency and the semantic and lexical target contexts. This is discussed in terms of noticing and category formation. This study argues that learners are able to use grammatical descriptions as some kind of auxiliary model for recognizing and categorizing target patterns. The descriptions thus make learners aware of the mechanisms underlying implicit learning and help them exploit these mechanisms for explicit learning.