Prepositions 02

Many prepositions indicate place, location or position. Prepositions are important for English sentence structure - they add meaning to a sentence.

How many prepositions can you list? There are a great number of prepositions in the English language, and, of these, some exist as pairs of opposites. So we have, for example, above/below; over/under; in/out. Other prepositions have no clear opposite: through, against, beside, around, etc.

How can you spot a preposition? Unless you know all of the prepositions by heart, you'll first need to find the nouns and then see whether any of them are part of a phrase which gives some type of positional information. Which are the prepositions in this sentence? "He opened the door, found the light switch on the wall to the right, switched it on and looked at the bat dangling from the rafters."

The nouns are: "He" (pronoun), "door", "light switch", "wall", "right" (you can tell because of the determiner, "the"), "it" (pronoun), "bat" and "rafters". Phew!

"He" is the subject pronoun; "door" is the direct object; "light switch" is another direct object. "On the wall to the right" gives extra information about the light switch and consists of two prepositional phrases "on the wall", "to the right", with the prepositions being "on" and "to". "At the bat" and "from the rafters" are also prepositional phrases telling us where he looked and where the bat was located, so "at" and "from" are also prepositions. As you can see, it is possible to have multiple prepositions in the same sentence!

Have a go at our second quiz on the subject.