The prepositions that most commonly follow the verb
deal are
with and
in, depending on meaning. In fact these collocations are so common, that
deal with and
deal in are often treated as phrasal verbs (or sometimes, prepositional verbs), for example at the
OALD (scroll down to Phrasal Verbs). But it appears that in one corner of the English-speaking world, at least,
deal with has a competitor.
A commenter on the language blog Pain in the English had noticed this sentence in the New Zealand Herald:
“Perhaps it’s time to deal to the ads that are just plain downers?”
Of course, there's no logical reason why deal should be followed by with. After all, we have the very similar expression see to - If you deal with the soup, I'll see to the main course. But with is what we're used to, so anything else sounds a bit odd.
Not finding any mention of deal to in my usage guides, New Fowler's (British), Merriam-Webster (American) and Swan (EFL), I googled "it's time to deal to" and got a few hits, mainly from New Zealand URLs and posted a comment saying that it did indeed seem to be a New Zealand usage. Another commenter pointed out, however, that a handful of hits "hardly bespeaks a well established usage" and suggested that they could just be grammatical errors or typos. But it seemed a bit strange to me that all these "errors" should be made in New Zealand, so I had a bit more of a dig around.
I tried to think what words collocate with deal with, and came up with need to deal with, necessary to deal with and want to deal with, and tried googling again, substituting to for with. This time I got quite a few more results, including from various organisations connected with the news, politics, the environment etc.
But this method was a bit haphazard; what I needed was something a bit more systematic. The obvious thing would be to check with a New Zealand dictionary. There is one online, but it's refusing to open for me, and anyway, that would spoil the fun.
Finding collocations
Luckily, there are a few free tools on the Internet for finding collocations (I'll be writing more about these very soon). By visiting Netstream.org I found the most common collocation was
"have to deal with", followed by
"how to deal with", see
here. I tried googling these but got quite a bit of "noise" (irrelevant entries like
"deal to some extent with"), so I refined it by adding
nz, and Hey Presto!, there were lots of entries from New Zealand. So I then tried it for the twenty or so most common collocations. Example sentences are given for each collocation. Click on the collocations on the left to see the search results
| have to deal to | It's one of the many things we have to deal to after this storm event |
| how to deal to | How to deal to workplace stress |
| had to deal to | However there's been a few odds and sods i've had to deal to manually |
| way to deal to | They've found a way to deal to the big problems |
| able to deal to | It would be good to be able to deal to some of these issues before they happen |
| having to deal to | as well as having to deal to any complaints |
| has to deal to | The National Party knows it has to deal to this issue |
| want to deal to | we want to deal to the culture of welfare dependency |
| need to deal to | Then, there's those jobs you need to deal to if you're going to keep the dog |
| hope to deal to | Lib Dems hope to deal to drug laws |
| ability to deal to | and by joining us you give FNZ the ability to deal to industry |
| ways to deal to | What are possible effective ways to deal to these problems for Christchurch? |
| order to deal to | In order to deal to the waves of incoming rogues, Batman and his offspring can punch their way clear using a basic attack |
| trying to deal to | The weekend protests about Housing New Zealand's Tamaki .... is trying to deal to a raft of problems |
| easy to deal to | he found it easy to deal to secondary school teachers |
| difficult to deal to | or perhaps someone who's drunk, just being rude or is very difficult to deal to |
| prepared to deal to | and we should be prepared to deal to it when it does |
| time to deal to | it's a good time to deal to weeds on your property or road frontage |
Using Google Site search
Another way of looking for expressions in context is to look them up on particular sites using Google's site facility, see
here for details). I got a list of the most popular newspapers, media organisations and blogs from Wikipedia, and tried site searches for
"to deal to". With one, Skysport, I had to knock off the first
to, but apart from one (TVNZ) they all came up with plenty (perhaps hundreds) of hits (just click on the links to see). They are, however, totally outnumbered by the more usual
"to deal with".
So deal to something / somebody does indeed seem to be an established idiom in New Zealand, although still vastly outnumbered by deal with. If any new Zealanders happen to stumble on this, perhaps they could let us know its status, and to what extent it's used.
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