Prepositions
Here is my treatise on prepositions. You can read the whole thing or use this list of contents to go straight to the preposition that irks you:
Oh, what can be said about prepositions? They are the bane of the ESL student because they change their meaning with the grammatical environment. Consider these uses of the verb "get":
| get up: | to leave the bed |
| get on: | to board a vehicle |
| get over: | to reach the end of an illness |
| get at: | to reach something difficult to reach |
| get by: | just enough |
Confronted with a list such as this, it's difficult to imagine the endless possibilities of the preposition.
But in the list above, "up", "on", "over", "at" and "by" are not really prepositions because they are an important part of the verb. Those little monsters above are called "phrasal verbs", an essential study of which is essential to every ESL student (I'll be dealing with some important ones in a future article). The preposition part of the phrasal verb is really called an "adverbial participle". Look at these two sentences:
- The motorcycle turned into a garage.
- The frog turned into a prince.
If your English is good enough, you'll realize that in the first sentence no transformation took place, while in the second it's obvious that some kind of witchcraft was involved.
The second sentence features the phrasal verb "turn into" which means to "become" in the sense of a metamorphosis. In this case "into" is an adverbial participle.
The true preposition shows a relationship between two things. The first sentence shows a relationship between the two objects, the car into the garage.
The trick is to know which preposition correctly shows that relationship. That, for the most part, can be done by learning which prepositions usually go with which verbs. Yeah, it's not easy. Look at it this way, with some languages, like German to name one of many, you have to learn an article for every noun, and that article can be masculine, feminine or neutral. It's a trade off. We haven't got such a thing in English.
We've got the horror of the impossible preposition.
Here's some help with some prepositions that I frequently see used mistakenly.
- before / in front of / across from
A very loose rule is that across fromand in front of are prepositions of place while before is a preposition of time.
| I'm sitting across from my student. |
| The bus stop is in front of Peter's Language School. |
| Before I had dinner I read an interesting article. |
The preposition before can also mean "in the presence of" as in:
- He had to appear before the judge last Tuesday.
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During is used when an action takes place once or several times within a period of time:
For is used when a period of time is referred to, when an action is meant to cover that period of time:
or to show the duration of an action:
By is both a preposition of time and place. As a preposition of time it means at which time or before which time an action should take place.
Until (also till) is used as a preposition of time, where an action takes place continuously and terminates at a particular time, usually given in the sentence:
By, as a preposition of place, means close to but not in a direct relationship with:
While at can mean that there is a reason for the proximity:
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