The use of the prepositions to and with after the verb to talk in British and American English : A corpus-based study

Abstract: This paper is a study of the use of the prepositions to/with after the verb to talk in British and American English. The research is based on the material from the COBUILDDirect corpus, Longman American Spoken Corpus and New York Times CD-ROM. The common and different features of the use of talk to/with in different genres of American and British English as well as in written and spoken English were studied; special attention was paid to the factors which influence the choice of the prepositions. The research has shown that generally talk with is used much less than talk to and probably is undergoing the process of narrowing of meaning. With after talk seems to be used most often to refer to two-way communication while talk to is used to refer to both one- and two-way communication and is, therefore, more universal than talk with.