The Logic of English Prepositions: Intuitively Understand and Feel English like a Native Speaker
Copyright 2018 by J. Daniel Moore
All Rights Reserved
Illustrations Copyright 2018 by Chongho Lee
All Rights Reserved
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This book is dedicated to my grandparents. Thank you for all of your love and support. I love you.
This book wouldnt be possible without the feedback of my students and friends. In particular, I thank those students who participated in the early stages of what has now become this book and who allowed me to successfully test my ideas with them.
Contents
Introduction
A language simultaneously obliges us and allows us to experience the world in a certain way.
-Mihalis Eleftheriou, founder of Language Transfer
(Note: this book is not associated with Language Transfer or its founder in any way.)
Every language has its own personality. A language is a living thing that lives through its speakers. Just like a person changes and grows over time, languages do the same, but more slowly. Each language has its own boundaries and ways that it likes to look at the world. This doesnt mean that a speaker of one language cant learn how to think in another language, its just that if you really want to learn a language well and be able to think in it and feel it, you have to understand that languages personality and how it looks at the world. This affects everything in a language, including prepositions, articles, perceptions of time and space, uses of verb tenses, and more, and theres increasing scientific evidence to support this idea.
Lets look at an example. Spanish and German both use something thats called grammatical gender, which means that some words in the language are masculine (male, related to man) and some words are feminine (female, related to woman). It doesnt matter what the word is. English uses biological gender, which basically means that things that arent male or female in the real world are called it because they dont have a real world, biological gender. For example, a chair cant be a man or a woman, but in Spanish the word chair is feminine.
Language researchers wanted to know if the grammatical gender in other languages affected the perception of native speakers. So the researchers asked native Spanish speakers and native German speakers (who were all fluent in English) to describe different objects using English. One of the English words that the Spanish and German speakers had to describe was the word bridge. In Spanish, the word bridge is masculine. They described the English word bridge using the words big, dangerous, strong, sturdy, and towering. These are all words that you might often associate with men. However, in German, the word bridge is feminine. What words did they use? Beautiful, elegant, fragile (easy to break), pretty, and slender (skinny). Interesting. It seems that a persons native language can affect how they perceive things.
This is just one small example, but heres the most important point: its possible to perceive one thing in many different ways. Its possible to perceive a bridge as either sturdy or fragile, dangerous or pretty, etc... All of these words can describe a bridge, depending on how you want to look at it. The personality of every language determines the ways that native speakers are likely to perceive things at a basic level (meaning subconsciously), but it doesnt mean that a Spanish speaker cant think of a bridge as beautiful or that a German speaker cant think of a bridge as sturdy. There are many different ways to look at things and thats one reason that languages are so different from each other. The purpose of this book is to help you discover and feel how the English language looks at the world. This book is only about prepositions, but prepositions are one of the most important parts of a language because they contain a lot of a languages personality.
This is a book about prepositions, so lets look at an example that uses them. In English, the verb to depend uses the preposition on. In Spanish, the verb depender uses the preposition de. The English word for de is usually of. So, if we literally translate depender de into English, we get to depend of. A native English speaker would never say that. It works in Spanish, but not in English. Why? Because the English language has its own personality, and so does the Spanish language. This book will help to teach you the personality of the English language and how it looks at the world. How? With logic. Specifically, the logic that the English language applies to its prepositions.
Im sure that your English teachers in the past told you that theres no logic to prepositions and that you simply have to memorize them. Im an English teacher (ESL/EFL) and I used to think this, too. However, Im also a language learner. In 2017, I was teaching myself German. I already had an intermediate level in Spanish, and in both of these languages, I hated prepositions. I was always making mistakes and I couldnt seem to figure out why these languages use prepositions so differently compared to English.
One day, I was talking to a friend (whos a native German speaker) about the different meanings of the German preposition auf. This preposition has meanings related to time, space, etc..., but the translations into English include on, up, at, and even for, depending on the context. I started to notice something interesting: it seemed that at least some of the dictionary definitions were closely connected, but some of those connections were abstract. I started to wonder if all of the dictionary definitions were connected in some way. So, I started with the simplest and easiest definitions and tried to find any connections. From that point, I started looking at other definitions that seemed different, but I tried to connect them to the easier definitions in a logical way. I wanted to make sure that I wasnt just imagining the connections, but that I was actually finding connections that do exist inside the German language itself. So I asked my German friend questions about certain definitions so that I could see if it were possible to connect all the definitions in a way that still made sense from the perspective of a native German speaker. At first, he told me not to try because there wasnt any logic that connected them and I just had to memorize how to use them. But I wanted to try anyway. A couple of weeks later, I had to stop learning German for a little while, but before I had stopped, it seemed that my idea was working. It seemed that there actually might be a hidden logic that connects all the different dictionary definitions, so I decided to start thinking about how we use prepositions in English.
The more I thought about it, the more it became very clear that English prepositions are extremely logical, and Ive found no exceptions, even when a preposition is used as a noun or a verb (though I have found a few cases that are difficult to explain). But why do English teachers say that there isnt any logic? Lets imagine a farm that grows a lot of different plants. On the surface, you see all the leaves and branches of the plants (the in plant, the on plant, the to plant, etc...). These leaves and branches are the different dictionary definitions that seem to be disconnected and random. These surface meanings are what native speakers are consciously aware of. However, under the ground we find the root of each plant. The root is the logic that all the dictionary definitions are based on. This underground level is part of the subconscious mind, which means that native speakers arent consciously aware of it. Just like on a real farm, the roots of two or more plants can touch and connect sometimes. Well see many special connections between prepositions for example, the extremely important connection between at, on, and in.
