This research presents examples from corpora where ‘in spite of’ directly follows clauses and behaves like a conjunction although the phenomenon has not been widely acknowledged and has been regarded as a mistake. This study empirically investigates whether ‘in spite of’ and other group prepositions expressing concession cause a functional shift from a preposition to a conjunction without causing any morphological changes. The research procedure is as follows: (i) The frequency of [in spite of + SV] in universally available corpora is shown from synchronic and diachronic perspectives; (ii) it is clarified how [in spite of + SV] is used in context, semantically and syntactically; (iii) what influences the establishment and functional conversion of [in spite of + SV] into a conjunction is explained; and (iv) whether other phraseological units expressing concession express the same phenomenon as [in spite of + SV] is explored based on quantitative and qualitative viewpoints.
Keywords: Concession, Conjunction, Corpus-Based Research, Functional Shift, Group Prepositions, Phraseological Units, Phraseology
