THE ENGLISH PREPOSITION

As we see in the essay Language and Identity on this blog, English is spared the complications of many other languages such as male, female and neutral nouns, the subjunctive form of the verb and complex counting systems.  It does, however, have its own bête noire, the preposition.  I am amused to see the way publishers have tried to cash in on this problem for English learners by publishing dictionaries of phrasal verbs (forgetting phrasal nouns and adjectives) and ignoring the vital element of social context in the use of these structures.  If you are an English language learner, do not waste your money on these publications and remember a simple rule – 99% of English expressions using prepositions can be said in another way, so you need not learn how to use them, just learn to understand them.  Life becomes so much easier....

So let’s get down to business. Languages are divided into analytic and synthetic types:

·          In a synthetic language, meanings of words are encoded in prefixes and suffixes. 

·       In an analytic one, meanings are transmitted by the use of other words (for example, prepositions) and word order. 

This is very important in the history of English, because during its history we see the language change from being synthetic to mainly analytic.  We say ‘mainly analytic’ because some anomalies remain, as in the comparison of adjectives, where we have ‘close, closer, closest’ (synthetic) and also ‘beautiful, more beautiful, most beautiful’ (analytic, although the change from ‘more’ to ‘most’ is synthetic!).

Two things make the English preposition especially difficult to use properly: first, their number and variety and second, the number of meanings each one can have.  In addition there are the phrasal verbs, nouns and adjectives, of which more later.

Let’s have a look at a simple example:

‘John missed his flight because he didn’t arrive at the airport in time’. 

No real problem there, although a slight variation in meaning would require a different preposition: ‘John missed his flight because he didn’t arrive at the airport at the right time’. 

Another variation would be: ‘John didn’t arrive in time for the meeting’ where we add another preposition – ‘for’.  Notice that there is nothing logical about the attribution of these prepositions – theoretically it should be possible to say ‘at time in the meeting’, but the language has chosen not to use this formula. 

This is the key to the whole question of preposition use – the preposition has no meaning in itself, and its use has nothing to do with logic.

So far so good, now let's take time and its prepositions a little further:

in time for

in time(s) of

at the time

at the time of

 at times

from time to time

out of time

by the time

on time

over time

(it’s) about time

We can see that from time to time might possibly a logical connection with the spatial use of the preposition, as do at the time and at times, but what about on time and over time?  When we use ‘You cannot write any more in this examination, you are out of time’, it may be with a positional sense of being outside the allocated time, but what about the illogical ‘We are out of milk; can you get some from the shop please?’  Presumably it comes from ‘We have run out of milk’ – but where is the logic in ‘running out of milk’?  Aha! (I hear you cry) that is an extension of the meaning that the last of the milk has ‘run out of the bottle’.  Oh yes?  So what about: ‘Sorry, I can’t sell you a pork pie, they’ve run out’?  Have they grown legs and run out of the shop?

And all this happens before we come to our major bête noir in English - the phrasal verb.  And let us not forget the phrasal noun and phrasal adjective (‘his way of doing it’, ‘frightened of wolves’, ‘frightened by wolves’).  Before we go any further, the best advice I can give concerning phrasal verbs is to generally treat them as passive vocabulary (i.e. you understand what they mean but don't necessarily have to use them).  This may be considered a shocking statement by teachers who have worked hard to teach students how to use these constructions, not to mention the students who have worked hard to learn them but it is worth remembering that for almost every phrasal verb there is a single-word equivalent.  These equivalents may make your English more formal and less colloquial, but that may be a better result than using the phrasal verb inappropriately or incorrectly.

First of all, the phrasal verb faces us with an essential problem of illogicality, as we began to see above: for example, the construction to put up may mean literally:

‘I have put up the shelves in the bathroom’ or

‘I wonder if you could put me up for the night’. 

If we take the second sentence literally, it is clearly nonsense: to what elevated position is the person asking to be placed for the duration of the night?  It means, of course: ‘May I sleep in your house tonight?’

Even in this sense use of the phrase is restricted by the register (level of formality) in which it is used: we would use it to friends or in a modest hotel; using it in more elite establishments would evoke only that of smile of tolerant contempt which reception staff at the better hotels are trained to use to drive away the peasants.  Equally, the phrase is limited by time: you can put someone up for possibly a maximum of six months; we would not really say: ‘John very kindly put me up for two years’. 

The latter situation would call for a variation on the phrase: ‘John very kindly put up with me for 18 months’ and suddenly, with the addition of one word, we are in very different territory: ‘to put up with’ meaning ‘to tolerate’.  Once again, there is not the remotest connection with the spatial or associative sense associated with these two words.  We have entered an area of language where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. 

Here again the phrase has its limitations: in terms of register it is informal and also, in terms of fields of human activity, it is restricted.  For example, ‘I can't tolerate/put up with his constant complaining’ is possible, but not ‘These ceramic tiles can tolerate/put up with temperatures of 1000°C’.

The best analogy I can find for the use of the preposition in English is the following:

·           The basic use of prepositions to indicate the location or association of objects, people and ideas is reasonably logical and explicable and may be compared to a pencil drawing. 

·           Moving further into the area of preposition use, we are adding primary colours to the picture. 

·           Full mastery of the combination of prepositions with open-class items of language (nouns, verbs and adjectives) can be compared to the subtle management of tones in an oil painting.  The English language already has a huge vocabulary of basic items and the use of prepositions increases the capacity of the language even more.

The problem for the learner, however, is that the use of these combinations is not dictated by grammatical rules or logic - it is controlled, as we have seen above - by custom and usage, rather like the famously unwritten British Constitution.  In other words, you can only learn how to actively use prepositional combinations beyond the elementary stage either by living with the natives for a long period or by reading large amounts of their literature.