Flipping the on/off switch: Change in progress in the prepositional complements of verbs like base

Traditionally, verbs like base have combined with the preposition on to express a meaning of derivation (based on). However, many writing in a US context have noticed the rapid rise of based off (of) alongside based on (Curzan 2013; Behrens 2014; Janda 2021). In this article, we document the relative increase of off in two English-language corpora in the verb base and six other verbs. The results show a clear real-time trend of increasing use of off, with some differences in the course of the change across different verbs. We also see an increase in use of off in apparent time, which we infer from the topical organization of comments in one of our corpora, the social media site Reddit.