Skip to main content

Are prepositions fixed for words?


Is it fixed that words will always take a specific preposition after them?
I am reading a book "High school English grammar". It says for example



The following nouns take preposition for after them. :- ambition, blame, aptitude candidate, match, ...



and



The following nouns take preposition of after them. :- assurance, charge, distrust, doubt, failure, ...



and same for other prepositions


Is that so? I am not a native English speaker but I doubt what is written in the book, I think prepositions are used according to meaning of sentence and are not fixed.



Answer



For the most part, your book is correct, but you are right to be suspicious. The appropriate word can change depending on the intended meaning of the sentence in some cases. Here are a few examples:




  • I have had a change of heart
    It is a change for the better




  • What we have here is a failure to communicate
    This is a failure of epic proportions




  • I have the ambition to succeed
    I have an ambition for greatness




Note: it is a good idea to talk to your instructor about questions like this. You may not be required to know all of the special cases right now. Special cases can make the learning process more complicated, so some classes will save them for later.


Wikipedia has this to say:



In ambiguous cases, there is not always a clear rule that dictates which adposition is appropriate, and different languages and regional dialects may have different conventions; the standard usage(s) of a given preposition can be idiomatic. Learning the conventionally preferred word is a matter of exposure to examples. For example, most dialects of American English have "to wait in line", but some have "to wait on line". It is for this reason that prepositions are one of the most difficult aspects of a language to learn for non-native speakers.



For reference, here is the description of adposition used in the same article:



In more technical language, an adposition is an element that ... indicates how that phrase should be interpreted in the surrounding context. Some linguists use the word preposition instead of adposition for all three cases.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Is there a word/phrase for "unperformant"?

As a software engineer, I need to sometimes describe a piece of code as something that lacks performance or was not written with performance in mind. Example: This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. Based on my Google searches, this isn't a real word. What is the correct way to describe this? EDIT My usage of "performance" here is in regard to speed and efficiency. For example, the better the performance of code the faster the application runs. My question and example target the negative definition, which is in reference to preventing inefficient coding practices. Answer This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. In my opinion, reads more easily as: This coding style leads to unmaintainable and poorly performing code. The key to well-written documentation and reports lies in ease of understanding. Adding poorly understood words such as performant decreases that ease. In addressing the use of such a poorly ...
Post a Comment
Read more

A man has a garden measuring 84 meters by 56 meters. He divides it into the minimum number of square plots. What is the length of the square plots?

We wish to divide this man's garden into the minimum number of square plots possible. A square has all four sides with the same length.Our garden is a rectangle, so the answer is clearly not 1 square plot. If we choose the wrong length for our squares, we may end up with missing holes or we may not be able to fit our squares inside the garden. So we have 84 meters in one direction and 56 meters in the other direction. When we start dividing the garden in square plots, we are "filling" those lengths in their respective directions. At each direction, there must be an integer number of squares (otherwise, we get holes or we leave the garden), so that all the square plots fill up the garden nicely. Thus, our job here is to find the greatest common divisor of 84 and 56. For this, we prime factor both of them: `56 = 2*2*2*7` `84 = 2*2*3*7` We can see that the prime factors and multiplicities in common are `2*2*7 = 28` . This is the desired length of the square plots. If you wi...
Post a Comment
Read more