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PREPOSITIONS
Prepositions are one of the four formal parts of speech (also conjunctions, articles, particles). They are
formal parts of speech because of their peculiar meaning, unchangeability, ability to perform specific
functions in the sentence, inability to construe sentences without notional parts of speech (except elliptical
ones).
There are over one hundred prepositions in English. This is a very small number compared with the
vast number of nouns, adjectives and verbs in the English vocabulary. Most sentences that people produce
contain at least one preposition; indeed, three out of ten most frequent English words are prepositions:
"of," "to" and "in." This means that the number of times you need to use a particular preposition is much
higher than an ordinary word such as a noun, an adjective, or a verb.
Prepositions provide information about place and time, or in a more abstract way, about relationship
between people or things. In some cases the meaning of a sentence can still be understood even if the
prepositions are taken out:
We'll concern ourselves ... the systematic uses ... some ... the more frequent English prepositions.
In other cases the prepositions provide essential information:
He put it back ... the table.
In this example the missing preposition could be "on," "behind," "next to," "under," "into," "above," or
several other prepositions and the choice here is important for the meaning of the sentence.
Prepositions have a peculiar lexical meaning; they denote concrete instances of concrete or abstract
notions. The following two poems vividly illustrate some peculiarities of prepositional meaning.
The Naughty Preposition
 
I lately lost a preposition;
It hid, I thought, beneath my chair.
And angrily I cried: "Perdition!
Up from out of in under there!"
Correctness is my vade mecum,
And straggling phrases I abhor;
And yet I wondered: "What should he come
Up from out of in under for?"
Morris Bishop
Who's In?
"The door is shut fast
And everyone's out."
But people don't know
What they're talking about!
Says the fly on the wall,
And the flame on the coals,
And the dog on his rug,
And the mice in their holes
And the kitten curled up,
And the spiders that spin —
"What, everyone's out?
Why, everyone's in!"
Elizabeth Fleming
In order to produce acceptable and natural English, you need to be able to select the right preposition.
English prepositions are unpredictable and specifically used. The Russian learners of the English
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