From the article: The first group of views... pins down the disappearance of MID as the need to eliminate excessive expressions and redundant synonyms under MI

From the article: The first group of views... pins down the disappearance of MID as the need to eliminate excessive expressions and redundant synonyms under MID's competition with WIÐ in the collocational phrases. The second group of views ... establishes a push chain and a drag chain movement between the three prepositions: MID, WIÐ and AGAINST. The third group... observes the cognitive advantage of spatial sense in the survival of prepositions and explains WIÐ's victory over MID... And concludes its introduction with: All three camps of opinions were confined to theoretical hypotheses lacking a quantitative approach, nor was due attention paid to the grand sociolinguistic backdrop of the English feudal society. Therefore, this paper aims to build on the previous research by introducing linguistic data based on quantitative methods, as well as connecting the change to the grander socioeconomic background of the medieval society.