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A preposition is a word governing, and usually preceding, a noun or pronoun and expressing a relation to another word or element in the clause.

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What is the appropriate preposition for this sentence?

If your intended meaning is about equally close to all of the example sentences, then any of the three prepositions is correct. …
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4 votes
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'Elizabeth I made of England a true and mighty nation.' why does this sentence have 'of'?

Those are a little less fitting, because the core meanings of these prepositions (with "make") are as above. … The core meaning of any word can be stretched, and the core meanings of prepositions in English often stretch a great deal. …
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7 votes

Is the sentence: "I always go to work on my car" correct?

Welcome to the confusing world of English prepositions. English prepositions sometimes have very little definite meaning by themselves. … This all means that in order to learn English, you can't simply remember the meanings of individual prepositions. You have to learn entire phrases. …
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preposition omission before "this time of day"

Both are correct. In English certain nouns and standard noun phrases that refer to a specific time can function as adverbs without needing to be introduced by a preposition. They indicate when the act …
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10 votes
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go on a trip "to" or "at"

But don't think that these prepositions mean the same thing in every context. … Often with English prepositions, you need to understand the phrase as carrying an important part of the meaning, which can't be inferred from the words and grammatical rules alone. …
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37 votes

"The books arrived TO you" or "The books arrived AT you"?

The verb arrive means to reach a place at the end of a journey. Since it focuses on the end of the motion, not the whole motion from beginning to end, it doesn't work with "to [a destination]" as a mo …
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10 votes

A question about how native speakers learn prepositions

Native speakers learn English prepositions from context and by actually communicating. This gives them a few important advantages over someone trying to learn prepositions from dictionaries. … Prepositions in phrasal verbs The biggest advantage of learning prepositions from context is that you don't expect them to have a meaning out of context. …
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1 vote

Preposition after "intuition"

This native American English speaker thinks the best choice is for, but then you’d probably want to drop “the basic concepts…” An intuition for something is a common phrase. If you have an intuition f …
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3 votes
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"Get + prep." vs. "go/come + prep."

I don't sense a connotation of difficulty or effort in get + prep. Get gets used in many, many phrasal verbs, where its core meaning of "acquire" mostly gets out of the way and serves as a placeholder …
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The function of the word upon

In that context, "upon" means: just after or as something happened. You could reword the sentence as follows: On February 1st, 2003, the seven crew members of the Space Shuttle Columbia perished when …
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Be (all) the better for something

There is an important difference of nuance, which the dictionary omits. The version with “all the better” suggests that the benefit is unexpected, or was not previously considered by the listener. A w …
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Determining grammatical function of "after" and "before"

Here are your examples with "before": Before breakfast, Mac had a headache. Preposition. Reason: it takes a noun, breakfast, as its object. "Before breakfast" is a prepositional phrase, which fu …
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4 votes

Is there any difference between the phrases "next month", "in the next month" and "for the n...

I will work in the next month. means that the day or days when you will work will occur some time within the next month. Perhaps you will work on November 4, or from November 8 to November 12, or …
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22 votes

'Have dinner by candlelight' - preposition 'By' means 'using'?

Most common prepositions in English are best understood as elements of phrases, where the phrase as a whole has the meaning, not the preposition by itself independently of a phrase. … This might make learning English prepositions seem hopeless. I do think that English prepositions are even more complicated than English spelling. …
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"approach to address" or "approach to addressing"?

Both are correct. Each exploits a different grammatical function of the word to. Depending on our point of view, we offer different approaches to address the same issue. Here, to means the same …
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