Is "from" superflous following "stop" or "prevent"?

Question

I seem to encounter this more from British speakers, but they'll often say something like

Protect it from heat to prevent the contents expanding.

instead of

Protect it from heat to prevent the contents from expanding.

It used to annoy me that from is omitted, but thinking about the meaning of the word, I'm not sure it makes sense to include it. I suspect it has been carried over from the phrasing to keep from happening, being synonymous with prevent. From makes sense to me here because keep is positional, and from signals where it shall not be. Omitting from would make the meaning positive, such that we'd ensure some action continues. But prevent and stop are already negative, and they're not positional.

In this related post, prevent to happen (which seems to me essentially the same as prevent happening) is compared to prevent from happening, but it seems only to address how common each is: "Preventing them to wrap" vs "Preventing them from wrapping"

I know the inclusion of from is far more common; is it superfluous? Further, is it even logical to include it?

Answer 1

Protect it from heat to prevent the contents expanding.

instead of

Protect it from heat to prevent the contents from expanding.

In the first, expanding is a participle acting in its meaning of "doing the action of the verb to expand." Its subject is "the contents".

In the second, expanding is a gerund in its meaning of "the action of the verb to expand" which, when modified by the preposition from forms an adjunct (adverbial).

Both are perfectly acceptable in American and British English.

Answer 2

This is, in fact, a case of variation between dialects. In American English, as one can see from Ngram, "prevent him from getting" is much more prevalent than "prevent him getting" or "prevent his getting." In British English, all three are common, though the version with "from" is still the most prevalent. To me (an AmE speaker), the version without "from" sounds very awkward, if not outright wrong.

Curiously, if you replace "getting" with "being," then the version with the genitive ("prevent his being") is somewhat common in AmE, but the version with the accusative ("prevent him being") is still rare. This also agrees with my intuition; to me these sentences do sound more acceptable with a genitive subject.