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 Contact info: [email protected] or lang.jdanielauthor.com/contact/ Thanks for subscribing to the newsletter! This PDF is a modified version of the book that only contains the first five prepositions and the map of the prepositions. This document is not for resale in any form. To buy the book, click here. Contents Introduction How to Use this Book OF ON TO IN FOR Appendix B – The Cone of Existence: English Preposition Maps More Information and Link to Buy on Amazon 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 it’s founder in any way.) Every language has it’s 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 doesn’t mean that a speaker of one language can’t learn how to think in another language, it’s 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 language’s 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 there’s increasing scientific evidence to support this idea. Let’s look at an example. Spanish and German both use something that’s 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 doesn’t matter what the word is. English uses “biological gender”, which basically means that things that aren’t male or female in the real world are called “it” because they don’t have a real world, biological gender. For example, a chair can’t 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 person’s native language can affect how they perceive things. 1 This is just one small example, but here’s the most important point: it’s possible to perceive one thing in many different ways. It’s 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 doesn’t mean that a Spanish speaker can’t think of a bridge as “beautiful” or that a German speaker can’t think of a bridge as “sturdy”. There are many different ways to look at things and that’s 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 language’s personality. This is a book about prepositions, so let’s 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 it’s 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. I’m sure that your English teachers in the past told you that “there’s no logic to prepositions” and that “you simply have to memorize them”. I’m an English teacher (ESL/EFL) and I used to think this, too. However, I’m 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 couldn’t seem to figure out why these languages use prepositions so differently compared to English. One day, I was talking to a friend (who’s 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 wasn’t 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 wasn’t 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 I’ve 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 isn’t any logic? Let’s 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 aren’t consciously aware of it. Just like on a real farm, the roots of two or more plants can touch and connect sometimes. We’ll see many special connections between prepositions – for example, the extremely important connection between “at”, “on”, and “in”. Prepositions aren’t just little grammar words. They’re critically important and hold a lot of meaning, and mastering them will allow you to think more like a native speaker. Think about it this way: we know that languages slowly change as time passes, but the speakers of a language don’t just randomly apply words to new contexts. There’s a logical reason why words are applied to new contexts. When this happens, we get an extension of the original meaning (which might be more abstract), or we get an entirely new meaning. Either way, the new meaning is usually based on the original logic of the word in some way. The best example of this change in English is phrasal verbs. In fact, phrasal verbs can’t exist if there’s no logic, especially because sometimes native English speakers spontaneously create phrasal verbs to fit very specific contexts. This is only possible if there’s a logic and a feeling that we can then apply in new ways to fit the context. It’s important to remember that although prepositions are logical, there’s no single book or other resource that will magically solve your language learning problems.