English Prepositions: Their Meanings and Uses

This book provides an integrated account of the main prepositions of English, outlining their various forms and illustrating contrastive senses. The three chapters in Part I delineate grammatical contexts of occurrence and special uses, exploring grammatical roles, phrasal verbs, and prepositional verbs respectively. In Part II, each chapter deals with a set of related prepositions, providing an integrated account of the meanings for each, and explaining how these are linked to their grammatical properties. There are two chapters on relational prepositions - principally of, for, by, and with - which have only minor reference to space or time. These are followed by seven chapters on prepositions whose basic meaning is spatial, with many extensions to abstract senses, and one that ties together the varied ways through which prepositions deal with time. The final chapter outlines how some people have attempted to prescribe how language should be used; it also covers dialect variation, foreign learners’ errors, and prospects for the future. The book is written in Dixon’s accustomed style - clear and well-organized, with easy-to-understand explanations, and with limited use of technical terms. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of the English language, including instructors of English as a second language.

R. M. W. Dixon, Adjunct Professor and Deputy Director of the Language and Culture Research Centre, James Cook University

R. M. W. Dixon is Adjunct Professor and Deputy Director of the Language and Culture Research Centre at James Cook University. He has published grammars of a number of Australian languages (including Dyirbal and Yidiñ), as well as studies of Boumaa Fijian (University of Chicago Press, 1988) and
Jarawara (OUP, 2004). His book The Rise and Fall of Languages (CUP, 1997) expounded a punctuated equilibrium model for language development; this is the basis for his detailed case study Australian Languages: Their Nature and Development (CUP, 2002). His many publications with OUP include the
three-volume work Basic Linguistic Theory (2010-12), Making New Words (2014), Edible Gender, Mother-in-Law Style, and Other Grammatical Wonders (2015; paperback 2020), and Are Some Languages Better than Others? (2016; paperback 2018). His autobiography, I Am a Linguist, was published by Brill in
2011.