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Grammar
Course: Grammar > Unit 5
Lesson 1: Introduction to prepositionsPrepositions of neither space nor time
Some prepositions describe relationships between people or things. These prepositions don’t include information about time or space.
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- I like this topic. That's all I really have to say, But I do have 1 question. Is there more specific types of, Time and space prepositions? Like age, Or... Inches? Or... You get the idea, Anyways that's what I have to ask, Thank you!(24 votes)
- eurneurneunruneuneurneunuenurenueneuneueuneueuneurnuenueruneunreuernunruneurnreunreunreunreunreuneurnurenurernuernurureurenruerneuernurueruerunu(3 votes)
- why is grammar so hard why wont we make it simple and easy it's 2017 a new age right.(3 votes)
- If you try to love a subject, it will slowly become interesting and the thing that interests you, you can grasp easily.
And videos are the best way to pique interest, especially KA videos.
Just for eg. I used to hate Geography last year. I started telling myself, "Oh, this is so interesting" and watched a lot of videos related to my portion and I started loving Geography. Last year i hated geography period, today I dream of becoming a Geography teacher one day.
Last;y, I'll quote David: You can learn anything. Durga out. ;-)(29 votes)
- If you said "Can you stop by the store later?" what would the proposition be?(8 votes)
- by the store, you are BY the store, or you could say Stop in the store.(2 votes)
- but isn't the subject talking about a person or thing. so shouldn't about be a preposition of space?(5 votes)
- You actually can use about as a preposition of space. Like "The deer was prancing about the field". However, it's more commonly used when "concerning" something. "We are talking 'about' grammar". Grammar is abstract, so it can't really be confined to space.(14 votes)
- About can be used as a preposition of time you can say "finish cleaning the house in about 5 minutes".(6 votes)
- "about" in that sentence is an adverb, not a preposition. It modifies "5", which is a numeral, functioning like an adjective.(6 votes)
- In the sentence "He was standing by the lake ." By acts as a preposition of space....now what?(2 votes)
- You've got it exactly right. In the sentence: "He was standing "by" the lake." The preposition locates him in space. If we were to write: "By the time we saw him, he was standing by the lake." In that sentence, the first use of "by" is a preposition of time, and the second use is a preposition of space. Now, let's go further: "By the time we read the book, "He was Standing By the Lake", by Norman Jones, the baby by our side had fallen asleep. "By" has at least three different uses in that sentence, one as "time", two as "space" and the third..... I don't know.(10 votes)
- Could 'with' be a space preposition?
I thought this would be possible because it represents two or more things together.(5 votes)- In my opinion yes, example: "My bother Dan sat 'with' me at the lake." or "My dog is 'with' me all the time."(2 votes)
- Dose anybody know exactly how many prepositions there are?(3 votes)
- Somebody might, but why would the number, whether it's something like 200 or 25,621, matter?(5 votes)
- David, you forgot to put a period or another form of punctuation after Inverness, on the second to last line you wrote.(1 vote)
- David Rheinstrom hasn't been here since Barack Obama was president of the USA (how I miss him!). Your catching him in this error shows that you have a sharp eye for things that aren't exactly right. There's a future for you as an editor, or as a detective.(8 votes)
- anyone here in 2022?(3 votes)
- Set the "sort by" box to read "recent" and look again. When it's set to "top voted", the answers from longer ago come first.(2 votes)
Video transcript
- [Voiceover] Hey grammarians, we've talked about prepositions of time and we've talked about
prepositions of space and I couldn't come up
with a cute name for these because the following five prepositions are examples of what we
would call prepositions that have connotations for
neither time nor space. Some of them do have time connotations and some of them do have
physical connotations and what we're going to
talk about today, however, are the uses of these
words, these prepositions, that don't have anything
to do with time or space, they just have, they
encode other relationships. Let's get to it, I'll
show you what I mean. When we say about it can mean you're talking about a specific subject. So I could say to you,
"Tell me about yourself!" The word by can be used to
denote agency or doing this. You'll see what I mean by that. I mean we can figure out who
is responsible for something with the use of the word by. The book was written by Sudhir. So who did the thing? Sudhir did the thing, he's the person with
agency, he's the doer. The word for denotes use. So if you were to ask me, for example, "David what's a wood chipper used to do?" I would say, "It's for chipping wood, "for turning wood into chips,
it's purpose is chipping." Of has this connotation of belonging or being part of a place. So we can talk about the great
green dragon of Inverness. Inverness is a place, it's in Scotland. Are there dragons there? I don't know, I've never been. And with means together or part of. There goes that snail
with the painted shell which indicates that
the snail and the shell are part and parcel, they're together. So yeah, so these prepositions can be used for all sorts of things. I understand this can be confusing. Prepositions are probably the most complicated part of English and the problem is you
just need to memorize them. But the good thing is that
there aren't that many because, as I've said before, prepositions are a closed
group, we don't mint new ones. So you don't have to be constantly trying to collect
more ones, or pick them up, or figure them out. You have a limited set
that you need to master and the way to do that is to read, and listen, and talk a lot. You can do that, you can
learn anything, David out.