Following the inclusion of the prepositional expression cara a in the Normas of 1982, there has been a tendency to use it even preceding place adverbs. We look here at the use of cara a and cara in such positions, basing out study on their occurrences in writing and speech in the Galician texts in TILG. Our fi ndings clearly show that, both in writing and in songs and transcriptions of oral use, the usual form during the period from 1612 to 1984 was cara + place adverb, and that although examples of cara a + place adverb, with a lower frequency than cara, do begin to appear in writing from 1985 onwards, this can only be due to ultracorrection based on the form given in the Normas. The rule for using cara rather than cara a parallels the rule for omitting a in the same syntactic environment in every respect. Cara a also coexists with other rarer options such as de cara a and (de) cara para
