📄 English Prepositions Explained. Revised edition

Summary

This is a short book review rather than an original study. Hirvonen evaluates Seth Lindstromberg's English Prepositions Explained (EPE, revised edition, John Benjamins, 2010), a reference work for teachers, learners, translators and materials writers. The book addresses a familiar difficulty: English prepositions form a small closed class, yet each is heavily polysemous and hard to pin down. EPE takes a usage-based, semantic approach grounded in Cognitive Linguistics. It explains spatial and figurative senses in prose and pictures, uses current corpus examples, and skips rare or archaic items. Chapters gather prepositions around shared meanings such as direction and path or static location. Each preposition is defined by contrast with its neighbours.

To test the book, the reviewer traces in across the chapters where it appears. She concludes that EPE organises a large, fuzzy domain well and is useful for teaching. She also notes weaknesses:

• the grouping logic is sometimes left implicit,
• the claimed coverage is wider than the dialects actually treated,
• core theoretical notions are explained too briefly.

Key points

• EPE covers almost 100 simple, compound and phrasal prepositions of contemporary British and North American English, with emphasis on frequent short ones like to, on, in.
• Its theoretical basis is Cognitive Linguistics, though it is not stated explicitly. Meanings are described verbally and illustrated pictorially, not through grammatical patterning.
• Simple in appears in four chapters:
  • Chapter 2 (direction/path) pairs it with into and contrasts it with to.
  • Chapter 4 (non-dynamic place) treats it with on and out.
• Some chapter themes have to be inferred by the reader, for example horizontal plane in Chapter 5 and proximity in Chapter 11. The reviewer attributes this to the fuzzy boundaries and polysemy of prepositions.
• The reviewer's criticisms:
  • The book says it covers English worldwide but actually treats only two varieties.
  • The notions 'Subject' and 'Landmark' need fuller explanation.
  • She also proposes classifications (pp. 15–19) and the index as aids.

Interesting ideas

• I1. Defining each preposition by contrast with near neighbours (in vs into vs to, in vs on vs out) makes sense boundaries explicit rather than listing senses in isolation.
• I2. Splitting every preposition's meaning into a literal spatial core plus figurative extensions gives a structured, graded sense inventory instead of a flat list.
• I3. Grouping prepositions under a shared semantic frame (static location vs direction/course of path) separates dynamic from non-dynamic relations.
• I4. Describing relations through a located 'Subject' and a reference 'Landmark' gives a uniform two-slot schema for every spatial preposition.
• I5. The reviewer tests the book by tracing one ambiguous, high-frequency word through every place it appears, which is a cheap way to audit an inventory's coherence.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

• I1 (frames): Preposition-sense assignment in prag could be framed as choosing among a small contrast set, logging which neighbour was rejected and why, so each spatial role decision stays explainable.
• I2 (world): The world model could store a spatial relation (containment, support, path) as the base and mark metaphorical uses as derived, letting entity states reuse the same geometry for "in trouble" or "in the box".
• I3 (frames): A dynamic/static flag on prepositional arguments would help tell motion events from locative states when building who-did-what-where frames.
• I4 (world): Encoding every prepositional relation as (subject, relation, landmark) would give the knowledge graph a consistent shape for answering "where is X" questions on fables and tales.
• I5 (learn): Evaluation could include per-preposition audits, collecting all parses and frames for in and checking whether sense choices are consistent across contexts.