English Prepositions Explained

This completely revised and expanded edition of English Prepositions Explained (EPE), originally published in 1998, covers approximately 100 simple, compound, and phrasal English prepositions of space and time – with the focus being on short prepositions such as at, by, in, and on. Its target readership includes teachers of ESOL, pre-service translators and interpreters, undergraduates in English linguistics programs, studious advanced learners and users of English, and anyone who is inquisitive about the English language. The overall aim is to explain how and why meaning changes when one preposition is swapped for another in the same context. While retaining most of the structure of the original, this edition says more about more prepositions. It includes many more figures – virtually all new. The exposition draws on recent research, and is substantially founded on evidence from digitalized corpora, including frequency data. EPE gives information and insights that will not be found in dictionaries and grammar handbooks.