Prepositions In English Language

Prepositions are words which have no specific meaning and describe a relationship among words in a sentence. A phrase beginning with a preposition are called prepositional phrase. Below is the list of the most common prepositions in English: aboard above across after against along among around at before behind below beneath beside(s) between beyond but by down during except for from in inside into like near of off on top of out (of) outside over past since through till to towards under underneath until up upon with within without In this essay, I will deal only with ‘at’, ‘in’, and ‘on’ as my main target prepositions due to their high frequencies in English and their multiple meanings which cause ESL learners numerous troubles.

2. The semantics

What makes learning prepositions so challenging?

They are, on the whole, polysemous. Polysemy is ‘a semantic characteristic of words that have multiple meanings’ (Koffi, 2010). For example, in the sentence: I live on An Duong Vuong street, the preposition ‘on’ indicates a spatial position, while it conveys a temporal meaning in: He went to work on time every day. This leads to the fact that every time learners want to determine a meaning of preposition or use it properly, they will have to put it in a context.

Another difficulty is due to the differences in languages. In particular, the use of prepositions in context varies vastly from one language to another. Take Vietnamese as an example, ‘Gíam đốc đang nói về việc lịch nghỉ Tết’. As can be seen that, the word ‘về’ can be translated into English as ‘about’, ‘on’ or even ‘over’, which depends much on the verb. Therefore, it would be extremely inaccurate when considering a choice of preposition based on instinct in mother tongue.

Last but not least, English is one of the languages which contain a various number of prepositions with over 60 ones. As a result, it is nearly impossible for language learners to systemize English prepositions (Mueller,

Evidence for prototype theory’s applicability

In Sally Rice’s experiment, 30 undergraduate student volunteers participated at the University of Alberta. Each student was asked to write 10 sentences for each preposition ‘on’, ‘in’ and ‘at’. This meant that there were 300 sentences in total. Here are some sentences along with rough classification that volunteers generated during the experiment: Sentences with