This is the first of the Forum’s retrospective of its wide-ranging 4-part retrospective of the English prepositions. The review materials are drawn from the vast wealth of lessons on preposition usage taken up in my English-usage column in The Manila Times
from 2002 onwards and from discussions about the subject posted in the Forum since 2009. The Prepositions Revisited Like most everybody else, I was superficial in learning my English-language prepositions. I never really thought they were important. They were just there to connect words with other words, a minor inconvenience that somehow helped in fleshing out the meaning of my sentences. When a preposition worked just right, nobody noticed or congratulated me for the effort; when it didn’t, of course, I would get a mild rap from my grammar teacher or the condescending smiles of those who knew better. I was therefore an educated barbarian in English prepositions. It was only much, much later that I discovered that there was in fact a system to their strange behavior, one that the English-language teachers of my time were perhaps too forgetful to share or probably did not know themselves.
But as they say, better late than never. Now I know that the prepositions, despite their seeming lack of logic, are perhaps the most hardworking part of speech of the English language. These beasts of linguistic burden give our sentences that much-needed sense of place and time, without which they could plunge into a netherworld of incoherence. There are
prepositions of place and location,
prepositions of movement and direction, and
prepositions of time, date, and duration. They come in so many kinds and do so many things. In fact, one simply cannot become a good writer or speaker in English until the prepositions have become second nature to one’s ears and tongue. (Our Tagalog-language forebears knew much better: they just used the generic
“sa” for practically all situations and avoided any difficulties and complications.)
The best way to begin is to renew our acquaintance with the prepositions of place and location. They are, after all, the ones that make us tumble so badly and breed our sense of grammatical insecurity. The staple prepositions for this purpose are, of course, “in,” “at,” and “on.” Their usage, as we all know, is largely idiomatic — almost quirky. Unlike nouns and verbs, there is no telling how they may fit until they are used in specific contexts. In fact, I knew of only one formal rule to help me choose among them: “Live
at an address,
in a house or city,
on a street,
with other people.” This makes “at” in this sentence, “The building is located
at Fort Bonifacio,” look and sound logical — so long as I thought of Fort Bonifacio as an address. But to say that I am a Fort Bonifacio resident, “in” seemed much better: “I live
in Fort Bonifacio.” I just learned to play it by ear with prepositions.
By itself, of course, this rule will hardly give us the confidence and grace to use these prepositions in most writing and speaking situations. Too much is at stake to rely on just one shibboleth. I have therefore consulted people whom I trust with their English grammar and checked several authoritative sources. From what I had gathered, I have put together a more detailed and helpful set of rules to help me make informed choices. You just might find use for them.
CLICK THE LINKS BELOW FOR THE REST OF THE LESSONS:Lesson #2 – Specific Rules for Preposition Usage Lesson #3 - Getting to Know the Prepositional Phrases Lesson #4 – Dealing with the Prepositional IdiomsThis 4-part essay first appeared in the English-usage column of Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times
and subsequently formed part of his book English Plain and Simple: No-Nonsense Ways To Learn Today’s Global Language
, © 2004 by Jose A. Carillo, © 2008 by the Manila Times Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.Read the question on preposition usage from a Forum contributor and business newspaper columnist that gave me the original impetus to run this retrospective series. (October 15, 2018)
