English Prepositions

Description

This book provides an integrated account of the main prepositions of English, outlining their various forms and illustrating contrastive senses. It is written in a clear and accessible style, and will be of interest to to students and scholars of the English language, including instructors of English as a second language.

• Provides an integrated account of the form and meaning of the main prepositions of English
• Illustrated throughout with extensive examples from a range of sources
• Written in a clear and accessible style, with limited use of technical terms

About the Author(s)

R. M. W. Dixon, Adjunct Professor, Central Queensland University, Cairns Campus

R. M. W. Dixon is Adjunct Professor at Central Queensland University, Cairns Campus. He has published grammars of Boumaa Fijian (University of Chicago Press, 1988), of Jarawara (OUP, 2004), and of several Australian languages (including Dyirbal and Yidiñ), as well as Australian Languages: Their Nature and Development (CUP, 2002), and Edible Gender, Mother-in-Law Style, and Other Grammatical Wonders (OUP, 2015; paperback 2020). His theoretical contributions include The Rise and Fall of Languages (CUP, 1997), the magisterial three-volume work Basic Linguistic Theory (OUP, 2010-12), and Are Some Languages Better than Others? (OUP, 2016; paperback 2018). He has also published on his native language, with A Semantic Approach to English Grammar (2nd edition; OUP, 2005), Making New Words: Morphological Derivation in English (OUP, 2014), The Unmasking of English Dictionaries (CUP, 2018), and the present volume.

Table of Contents

Preliminaries
Abbreviations and conventions
1:A story to tell
Part I. The Stage is Set
2:Grammatical roles
3:Phrasal verbs
4:Prepositional verbs
Part II. The Players
5:The mainstays: of, for
6:Supporting artists: by, with, together, together-with, except(-for), but(-for), despite, in-spite-of
7:The central spatial prepositions: at, to, toward(s), from
8:Enclosure: in, into, out, out-of; within, without, inside(-of), outside(-of)
9:Connection and adjacency: On, upon, onto, off, off-of; against; beside(s)
10:Superiority: up, up-to, down
11:Position: Over, under, above, below, beneath, underneath; behind, ahead(-of), in-front(-of), back, forth, forwards(s), backward(s); beyond, near(-to), close-to, far-from; along alongside, across, through, throughout
12:Distribution: among(st), amid(st), between, in-between; (a)round; about, concerning
13:Separation: Apart(-from), aside(-from), away(-from)
14:Temporal: Since, because(-of); until/till, up-until/up-till; during; after, afterward(s), before, beforehand; past; and more
15:Do it your way
Sources and notes
References
Index