Abstract

The participle and marginal preposition in New Zealand English have special characteristics. The aim of this paper is to clarify three characteristics of their usage through an analysis of media English. To that end, we took the following steps. We first collected examples of participles and marginal prepositions found in newspapers and magazines issued in New Zealand. We next categorized them under the following themes: “specification of agent in the passive”, “adjectival participle clause”, “the frequency of the passive”, “the formality of expression”, “the use of brackets and dashes”, “erroneous usage” and “the use of marginal prepositions.” An analysis of the seven categories showed “clarity”, “conservatism” and “ambiguity” to be the factors most related to the effective use of participles and marginal prepositions in written New Zealand English.