Om brugen af i og på før udvalgte komplementer

The prepositions i and på (‘in’ and ‘on’) are both used in Danish to describe the position of something in relation to something else. This paper examines two selected domains, roads and island states, that are interesting in terms of the relationship between the prepositions and their complements. In both domains, the data shows a great deal of variation and apparent interchangeability in the choice of preposition. The topic has been given limited attention in the available literature, which primarily makes specific claims without empirical backing. The study reports frequency data from corpus searches in KorpusDK which support some the existing claims in the literature and nuance others. In some cases, what looks like interchangeability on the surface actually turns out to be predictably rule- governed.