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A preposition describes a relationship between other words in a sentence. In itself, a word like "in" or "after" is rather meaningless and hard to define in mere words. For instance, when you do try to define a preposition like "in" or "between" or "on," you invariably use your hands to show how something is situated in relationship to something else. Prepositions are nearly always combined with other words in structures called prepositional phrases. Prepositional phrases can be made up of a million different words, but they tend to be built the same: a preposition followed by a determiner and an adjective or two, followed by a pronoun or noun (called the object of the preposition). This whole phrase, in turn, takes on a modifying role, acting as an adjective or an adverb, locating something in time and space, modifying a noun, or telling when or where or under what conditions something happened. Consider the professor's desk and all the prepositional phrases we can use while talking about it. You can sit before the desk (or in front of the desk). The professor can sit on the desk (when he's being informal) or behind the desk, and then his feet are under the desk or beneath the desk. He can stand beside the desk (meaning next to the desk), before the desk, between the desk and you, or even on the desk (if he's really strange). If he's clumsy, he can bump into the desk or try to walk through the desk (and stuff would fall off the desk). Passing his hands over the desk or resting his elbows upon the desk, he often looks across the desk and speaks of the desk or concerning the desk as if there were nothing else like the desk. Because he thinks of nothing except the desk, sometimes you wonder about the desk, what's in the desk, what he paid for the desk, and if he could live without the desk. You can walk toward the desk, to the desk, around the desk, by the desk, and even past the desk while he sits at the desk or leans against the desk. All of this happens, of course, in time: during the class, before the class, until the class, throughout the class, after the class, etc. And the professor can sit there in a bad mood [another adverbial construction]. Those words in bold font are all prepositions. Some prepositions do other things besides locate in space or time "My brother is like my father." "Everyone in the class except me got the answer." but nearly all of them modify in one way or another. It is possible for a preposition phrase to act as a noun "During a church service is not a good time to discuss picnic plans" or "In the South Pacific is where I long to be" but this is seldom appropriate in formal or academic writing. You may have learned that ending a sentence with a preposition is a serious breach of grammatical etiquette. It doesn't take a grammarian to spot a sentence-ending preposition, so this is an easy rule to get caught up on (!). Although it is often easy to remedy the offending preposition, sometimes it isn't, and repair efforts sometimes result in a clumsy sentence. "Indicate the book you are quoting from" is not greatly improved with "Indicate from which book you are quoting."
Based on shaky historical precedent, the rule itself is a latecomer to the rules of writing. Those who dislike the rule are fond of recalling Churchill's rejoinder: "That is nonsense up with which I shall not put." We should also remember the child's complaint: "What did you bring that book that I don't like to be read to out of up for?" Is it any wonder that prepositions create such troubles for students for whom English is a second language? We say we are at the hospital to visit a friend who is in the hospital. We lie in bed but on the couch. We watch a film at the theater but on television. For native speakers, these little words present little difficulty, but try to learn another language, any other language, and you will quickly discover that prepositions are troublesome wherever you live and learn. This page contains some interesting (sometimes troublesome) prepositions with brief usage notes. To address all the potential difficulties with prepositions in idiomatic usage would require volumes, and the only way English language learners can begin to master the intricacies of preposition usage is through practice and paying close attention to speech and the written word. Keeping a good dictionary close at hand (to hand?) is an important first step.
Prepositions are sometimes so firmly wedded to other words that they have practically become one word. (In fact, in other languages, such as German, they would have become one word.) This occurs in three categories: nouns, adjectives, and verbs.
Everyonefrom beginning learners in English to veterans in journalismknows the frustration of not having the right word immediately available in that lexicon one carries between one's ears. Sometimes it's a matter of not being able to recall the right word; sometimes we never knew it. It is also frustrating to read a newspaper or homework assignment and run across words whose meanings elude us. Language, after all, is power. When your children get in trouble fighting with the neighbors' children, and your neighbors call your children little twerps and you call their children nefarious miscreantswell, the battle is over and they didn't stand a chance. Building a vocabulary that is adequate to the needs of one's reading and self-expression has to be a personal goal for every writer and speaker.
Making It Personal
Using some durable piece of paperwhite construction paper or the insides of the ripped-off covers of old notebooksbegin to write down words in small but readable script that you discover in your reading that you can't define. Read journals and newspapers that challenge you in terms of vocabulary. Pursue words actively and become alert to words that you simply overlooked in the past. Write down the words in one column; then, later, when you have a dictionary at your disposal, write down a common definition of the word; in a third column, write a brief sentence using the word, underlined. Carry this paper or cardboard with you always. In the pauses of your busy daywhen you're sitting on the bus, in the dentist's office, during commercialstake out the paper and review your vocabulary words until you feel comfortable that you would recognize (and be able to use) these words the next time you see them. The amazing thing is that you will see the words againeven "nefarious miscreants," and probably sooner than you thought. In fact, you might well discover that the words you've written down are rather common. What's happening is not that, all of a sudden, people are using words you never saw before, but that you are now reading and using words that you had previously ignored.
Two trucks loaded with thousands of copies of Roget's Thesaurus collided as they left a New York publishing house last Thursday, according to the Associated Press. Witnesses were aghast, amazed, astonished, astounded, bemused, benumbed, bewildered, confounded, confused, dazed, dazzled, disconcerted, disoriented, dumbstruck, electrified, flabbergasted, horrified, immobilized, incredulous, nonplussed, overwhelmed, paralyzed, perplexed, scared, shocked, startled, stunned, stupified, surprised, taken aback, traumatized, upset. . . .
joke circulated on the Internet December 2003
A thesaurus is like a dictionary except that it groups words within constellations of meaning. It is often useful in discovering just the right word you need to express what you want to say. Make sure you correctly understand the definition of a word (by using a dictionary) before using it in some important paper or report. Your bookstore salesperson can provide plenty of examples of an inexpensive thesaurus. The online Merriam Webster's WWWebster Dictionary has access to both an extensive dictionary and a hyperlinked thesaurus. Links allow you to go conveniently back and forth between the dictionary and the thesaurus. If you have a speedy computer processor and a fast hookup to the internet, we recommend the Plumb Design Visual Thesaurus. Once the program is entirely loaded, type in a word that you would like to see "visualized," hit the return key, and a construct of verbal connections will float across the screen. Click on any of the words within that construct and a new pattern of connections will emerge. Try the Visual Thesaurus with several different kinds of wordsverbs, adverbs, nouns, adjectivesand try adjusting some of the various controls on the bottom of the window. We do not recommend this web-site for slow machines; in fact, the bigger your monitor and the faster your computer and connection, the more satisfying this experience will be. When people use a word that puzzles you, ask what it means! You'll find that most instructors, especially, are not in the least bothered by such questionsin fact, they're probably pleased that you're paying such close attentionbut if they do seem bothered, write down the word and look it up later, before the context of the word evaporates.
community college. (And an anthropoid, while we're at it, is an animal who walks like a human being.) Learning the roots of our language can even be fun! Some common Greek and Latin roots: Root (source) aster, astr (G) audi (L) bene (L) bio (G) dic, dict (L) fer (L) fix (L) geo (G) graph (G) jur, just (L) log, logue (G) luc (L) manu (L) meter, metr (G) op, oper (L) path (G) ped (G) phil (G) phys (G) scrib, script (L) tele (G) ter, terr (L) vac (L) verb (L) vid, vis (L) Meaning star to hear good, well life to speak to carry to fasten earth to write law word, thought, speech light hand measure work feeling child love body, nature to write far off earth empty word to see English words astronomy, astrology audible, auditorium benefit, benevolent biology, autobiography dictionary, dictator transfer, referral fix, suffix, affix geography, geology graphic, photography jury, justice monolog(ue), astrology, biology, neologism lucid, translucent manual, manuscript metric, thermometer operation, operator pathetic, sympathy, empathy pediatrics, pedophile philosophy, Anglophile physical, physics scribble, manuscript telephone,television territory, extraterrestrial vacant, vacuum, evacuate verbal, verbose video, vision, television
Knowing the Greek and Latin roots of several prefixes and suffixes (beginning and endings attached to words) can also help us determine the meaning of words. Ante, for instance, means before, and if we connect bellum with belligerant to figure out the connection with war, we'll know that antebellum refers to the period before war. (In the United States, the antebellum period is our history before the Civil War.) Prefixes showing quantity Meaning half one two hundred thousand without, no, not not, absence of, opposing, against Prefixes in English Words semiannual, hemisphere unicycle, monarchy, monorail binary, bimonthly, dilemma, dichotomy century, centimeter, hectoliter millimeter, kilometer asexual, anonymous, illegal, immoral, invalid, irreverent, unskilled nonbreakable, antacid, antipathy, contradict
opposite to, counterclockwise, counterweight complement to do the opposite dehorn, devitalize, devalue of, remove, reduce do the opposite disestablish, disarm of, deprive of wrongly, bad before after again above, over across, over below, under in front of behind out of into misjudge, misdeed antecedent, forecast, precede, prologue postwar rewrite, redundant supervise, supererogatory transport, translate infrasonic, infrastructure, subterranean, hypodermic proceed, prefix recede erupt, explicit, ecstasy injection, immerse, encourage, empower Prefixes showing time
around with
Authority for this table: The Little, Brown Handbook by H. Ramsay Fowler and Jane E. Aaron, & Kay Limburg. 6th ed. HarperCollins: New York. 1995. By permission of Addison-Wesley Educational Publishers Inc.
Suffixes, on the other hand, modify the meaning of a word and frequently determine its function within a sentence. Take the noun nation, for example. With suffixes, the word becomes the adjective national, the adverb nationally, and the verb nationalize. See what words you can come up with that use the following suffixes.
Typical noun suffixes are -ence, -ance, -or, -er, -ment, -list, -ism, -ship, -ency, -sion, -tion, -ness, -hood, -dom Typical verb suffixes are -en, -ify, -ize, -ate Typical adjective suffixes are -able, -ible, -al, -tial, -tic, -ly, -ful, -ous, -tive, -less, -ish, -ulent The adverb suffix is -ly (although not all words that end in -ly are adverbslike friendly)
Vocabulary University is a new online resource for working on groups of related vocabulary words in a puzzle format. Vocabulary U., a graphically rich Web site, is broken into beginning, intermediate, and college-level work. Vocabulary for English Language Learners is a treasury and nicely organized resources for ESL students. It is maintained by the College of Arts & Sciences of Ohio University. There are also at least two services that send you an e-mail message every day with a new wordwith definitions, pronunciation guides, and examples of its use. Get in the habit of reading these messages regularly. Print out the words and definitions you think will be really useful, or write them down and carry them around with you on your personal vocabulary builder.
achieve, believe, bier, brief, hygiene, grief, thief, friend, grieve, chief, fiend, patience, pierce, priest ceiling, conceive, deceive, perceive, receipt, receive, deceit, conceit
But then things get complicated: it doesn't work with words pronounced "ay" as in neighbor, freight, beige, sleigh, weight, vein, and weigh and there are many exceptions to the rule: either, neither, feint, foreign, forfeit, height, leisure, weird, seize, and seizure. Still, the rule is relatively simple and worth remembering.
advancing surprising
However, if the ending begins with a consonant, keep the final e: advancement likeness (However, if the silent e is preceded by another vowel, drop the e when adding any ending: argument, argued, truly.) Exceptions: to avoid confusion and mispronunciation, the final e is kept in words such as mileage and words where the final e is preceded by a soft g or c: changeable, courageous, manageable, management, noticeable. (The word management, for example, without that e after the g, would be pronounced with a hard g sound.)
crying studying
obeyed saying
When adding an ending to a word that ends in a consonant, we double that consonant in many situations. First, we have to determine the number of syllables in the word. Double the final consonant before adding an ending that begins with a vowel when the last syllable of the word is accented and that syllable ends in a single vowel followed by a single consonant.
submit is accented on the last syllable and the final consonant is preceded by a vowel, so we double the t before adding, for instance, an -ing or -ed: submitting, submitted. flap contains only one syllable which means that it is always accented. Again, the last consonant is preceded by a vowel, so we double it before adding, for instance, an -ing or -ed: flapping, flapped. This rule does not apply to verbs that end with "x," "w," "v," and "y," consonants that cannot be doubled (such as "box" [boxing] and "snow" [snowing]). open contains two syllables and the last syllable is preceded by a single vowel, but the accent falls on the first syllable, not the last syllable, so we don't double the n before adding an ending: opening, opened. refer contains two syllables and the accent falls on the last syllable and a single vowel precedes the final consonant, so we will double the r before adding an ending, as in referring, referral. The same would apply to begin, as in beginner, beginning. relent contains two syllables, but the final consonant is preceded by another consonant, not a vowel, so we do not double the t before adding an ending: relented, relenting. deal looks like flap (above), but the syllable ends in a consonant preceded not by a single vowel, but by two vowels, so we do not double the final l as in dealer and dealing. The same would apply, then, to despair: despairing, despaired.
acquire acquitted advice advise amateur among analysis analyze annual apartment apparatus apparent appearance arctic arguing argument arithmetic ascend athletic attendance balance battalion beginning belief believe beneficial benefited boundaries Britain business calendar candidate category cemetery changeable changing choose chose coming commission committee comparative compelled conceivable conferred
disappearance disappoint disastrous discipline dissatisfied dormitory effect eighth eligible eliminate embarrass eminent encouragement encouraging environment equipped especially exaggerate excellence exhilarate existence existent experience explanation familiar fascinate February fiery foreign formerly forty fourth frantically generally government grammar grandeur grievous height heroes hindrance hoping humorous hypocrisy hypocrite
lose losing maintenance maneuver manufacture marriage mathematics maybe mere miniature mischievous mysterious necessary Negroes ninety noticeable occasionally occurred occurrence omitted opinion opportunity optimistic paid parallel paralysis paralyze particular pastime performance permissible perseverance personal personnel perspiration physical picnicking possession possibility possible practically precede precedence preference preferred
quizzes recede receive receiving recommend reference referring repetition restaurant rhyme rhythm ridiculous sacrifice sacrilegious salary schedule seize sense separate separation sergeant severely shining similar sincerely sophomore specifically specimen statue studying succeed succession surprise technique temperamental tendency tragedy transferring tries truly tyranny unanimous undoubtedly unnecessary until
Assignment: Log on to this site, do online Quiz Numbers 1 to 3. The page with the result of your test should be submitted next meeting. I trust that you will be honest in not retaking it should you have any mistakes committed. It will not be your honesty against HIM up in heaven. Thanks for being honest. http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/cgishl/quiz20.pl/spelling_quiz1.htm?cgi_quiz_form=1