In the Present-Day English adjectives and participles are often followed by a preposition plus V-ing (hereafter called PG construction). However, some adjectives and participles can be immediately followed by V-ing without an intermediate preposition (hereafter NG). Therefore, such adjectives/participles can have both NG and PG constructions. This article investigates 13 such predicates (happy, comfortable, bored, tired, fed up; busy, engaged, occupied; late, quick, slow, done, finished) in the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) and examines the frequency changes of their NG vs PG structures in American English from 1820 to 2009. The findings of this study are as follows: (i) NG is a more recent structure than PG, (ii) the frequency of NG has gradually increased over time with most predicates, (iii) except engaged, the percentage of NG to PG was higher in the late 1900 than the early 1800, and with some predicates NG is more preferred than PG in the Present-Day English, (iv) as shown by the fact that some predicates were more resistant to the change, a linguistic innovation does not apply simultaneously but spread gradually across the relevant lexical items/structures.