Frekwencja oraz funkcje przyimków złożonych i wtórnych w sprawozdaniach administracyjnych

This paper examines the distribution and functions of compound and complex prepositions in Polish and EU administrative reports. The analysis is conducted in the corpus-based methodology using corpora of reports drafted by the Polish ministries and by the European Commission, and a large reference corpus – the National Corpus of Polish. The findings of the study show that in comparison to the reference corpus, reports demonstrate a strong tendency to use compound and complex prepositions. It is argued that frequent use of prepositions may be deemed a feature of the genre of administrative reports. Moreover, the study revealed that compound and complex prepositions serve mainly referential, causal, temporal, text deixis and measuring functions. This is in line with the main objective of administrative reports, i.e. communicating information to the public.