Dropped "on"

[Arnold Zwicky]

[climbing back on my familiar steed...]

modern english has both bare NP adverbials ("Monday we'll sort the
books"), a minority type, and prepositionally marked adverbials
("On Monday we'll sort the books"), the majority type.  the
difference in frequency should not automatically be taken to
indicate a direction of synchronic derivation, via preposition
*dropping*.  on the face of it, the language simply has both
NPs and PPs serving the Adverbial function.

(is "tomorrow" in "Tomorrow we sort the books" to be derived
by *obligatorily* deleting the preposition "on"? ditto "next
week" in "Next week we sort the books"?)

this is a separate, and in principle unrelated, question, but is
there any reason to think that bare NP adverbials like "Monday",
"tomorrow", and "next week" above were *historically* the result
of "dropping" a preposition?

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)