Teachers plant seeds of knowledge that grow for ever...A preposition describes a relationship between other words in a sentence. In itself, a word like "in" or "after" is rather meaningless and hard to define in mere words. For instance, when you do try to define a preposition like "in" or "between" or "on," you invariably use your hands to show how something is situated in relationship to something else. Prepositions are nearly always combined with other words in structures called prepositional phrases. Prepositional phrases can be made up of a million different words, but they tend to be built the same: a preposition followed by a determiner and an adjective or two, followed by a pronoun or noun (called the object of the preposition). This whole phrase, in turn, takes on a modifying role, acting as an adjective or an adverb, locating something in time and space, modifying a noun, or telling when or where or under what conditions something happened.
Consider the professor's desk and all the prepositional phrases we can use while talking about it.
You can sit before the desk (or in front of the desk). The professor can sit on the desk (when he's being informal) or behind the desk, and then his feet are under the desk or beneath the desk. He can stand beside the desk (meaning next to the desk), before the desk, between the desk and you, or even on the desk (if he's really strange). If he's clumsy, he can bump into the desk or try to walk through the desk (and stuff would fall off the desk). Passing his hands over the desk or resting his elbows upon the desk, he often looks across the desk and speaks of the desk or concerning the desk as if there were nothing else like the desk. Because he thinks of nothing except the desk, sometimes you wonder about the desk, what's in the desk, what he paid for the desk, and if he could live without the desk. You can walk toward the desk, to the desk, around the desk, by the desk, and even past the desk while he sits at the desk or leans against the desk.
All of this happens, of course, in time: during the class, before the class, until the class, throughout the class, after the class, etc. And the professor can sit there in a bad mood [another adverbial construction].
Those words in bold blue font are all prepositions. Some prepositions do other things besides locate in space or time — "My brother is like my father." "Everyone in the class except me got the answer." — but nearly all of them modify in one way or another. It is possible for a preposition phrase to act as a noun — "During a church service is not a good time to discuss picnic plans" or "In the South Pacific is where I long to be" — but this is seldom appropriate in formal or academic writing.
Click HERE for a list of common prepositions that will be easy to print out.
You may have learned that ending a sentence with a preposition is a serious breach of grammatical etiquette. It doesn't take a grammarian to spot a sentence-ending preposition, so this is an easy rule to get caught up on (!). Although it is often easy to remedy the offending preposition, sometimes it isn't, and repair efforts sometimes result in a clumsy sentence. "Indicate the book you are quoting from" is not greatly improved with "Indicate from which book you are quoting." |
Is it any wonder that prepositions create such troubles for students for whom English is a second language? We say we are at the hospital to visit a friend who is in the hospital. We lie in bed but on the couch. We watch a film at the theater but on television. For native speakers, these little words present little difficulty, but try to learn another language, any other language, and you will quickly discover that prepositions are troublesome wherever you live and learn. This page contains some interesting (sometimes troublesome) prepositions with brief usage notes. To address all the potential difficulties with prepositions in idiomatic usage would require volumes, and the only way English language learners can begin to master the intricacies of preposition usage is through practice and paying close attention to speech and the written word. Keeping a good dictionary close at hand (to hand?) is an important first step.
We use at to designate specific times.
We use on to designate days and dates.
We use in for nonspecific times during a day, a month, a season, or a year.
We use at for specific addresses.
We use on to designate names of streets, avenues, etc.
And we use in for the names of land-areas (towns, counties, states, countries, and continents).
Prepositions of Location: in, at, and on | |||
| IN (the) bed* the bedroom the car (the) class* the library* school* | AT class* home the library* the office school* work | ON the bed* the ceiling the floor the horse the plane the train | NO PREPOSITION downstairs downtown inside outside upstairs uptown |
* You may sometimes use different prepositions for these locations. | |||
We use to in order to express movement toward a place.
Toward and towards are also helpful prepositions to express movement. These are simply variant spellings of the same word; use whichever sounds better to you.
With the words home, downtown, uptown, inside, outside, downstairs, upstairs, we use no preposition.
We use for when we measure time (seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, years).
We use since with a specific date or time.
Prepositions are sometimes so firmly wedded to other words that they have practically become one word. (In fact, in other languages, such as German, they would have become one word.) This occurs in three categories: nouns, adjectives, and verbs.
NOUNS and PREPOSITIONS | ||
| approval of | fondness for | need for |
ADJECTIVES and PREPOSITIONS | ||
| afraid of | fond of | proud of |
VERBS and PREPOSITIONS | ||
| apologize for | give up | prepare for |
A combination of verb and preposition is called a phrasal verb. The word that is joined to the verb is then called a particle. Please refer to the brief section we have prepared on phrasal verbs for an explanation.
In everyday speech, we fall into some bad habits, using prepositions where they are not necessary. It would be a good idea to eliminate these words altogether, but we must be especially careful not to use them in formal, academic prose.
From the my deep heart HAPPY TEACHERS´ DAY!"Teaching that impacts is not head to head, but heart to heart."
(La enseñanza que deja huella no es la que se hace de cabeza a cabeza, sino de corazón a corazón.)
