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ON THE MEANING OF THREE ENGLISH PREPOSITIONS

Profile image of Ignasi Navarro i FerrandoIgnasi Navarro i Ferrando

2006, In-roads of language: essays in English Studies

Abstract

Learners of English as Foreign Language (EFL), like myself, encounter many difficulties in their quest for fluency in the language. In our struggle to actively master English vocabulary we generally assume that nouns and verbs are mostly important, so that the generalised attitude consists in trying to learn as many of these as possible. The semantic relevance of other words, such as prepositions, is diminished because they are considered "easy words". Learners just tend to apply a straightforward correspondence to "easy words" in their mother tongue, so that Eng. in is used as an equivalent to Sp. en, or Eng. to as an equivalent to Sp. a, and so on. By doing so, learners tend to think that the learning job is done. In my opinion, the consequence of that mistaken attitude is so crucial that it may delay the fluent native-like mastery of the language -or a near idiolect-for decades. Moreover, linguists have not usually considered the semantic factors that determine prepositional choice in use, but have generally described this type of words only according to their syntactic function or their position in the clause. However, as linguists we should consider the fact that these words might mean a lot more. Whenever their choice in language use is difficult to explain, the general claim states that this use is chaotic, capricious, or that these words form part of other lexical units where they do not contribute any meaning, i.e. prepositional verbs or phrasal verbs. The lexical units at, on and in are three of these words. In this paper, I will use these three words for illustration, and I will try to dismantle these two general assumptions: on the one hand, that these words are easy to learn or have exact interlinguistic correspondences, and on the other hand, that their use is otherwise chaotic or lexicalised.

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