This book provides an integrated account of the main prepositions of English, outlining their various forms and illustrating contrastive senses. The three chapters in Part I delineate grammatical contexts of occurrence and special uses, exploring grammatical roles, phrasal verbs, and prepositional verbs respectively. In Part II, each chapter deals with a set of related prepositions, providing an integrated account of the meanings for each, and explaining how these are linked to their grammatical properties. There are two chapters on relational prepositions - principally of, for, by, and with - which have only minor reference to space or time. These are followed by seven chapters on prepositions whose basic meaning is spatial, with many extensions to abstract senses, and one that ties together the varied ways through which prepositions deal with time. The final chapter outlines how some people have attempted to prescribe how language should be used; it also covers dialect variation, foreign learners' errors, and prospects for the future. The book is written in Dixon's accustomed style - clear and well-organized, with easy-to-understand explanations, and with limited use of technical terms. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of the English language, including instructors of English as a second language.

Based on the systematic analysis of large amounts of computer-readable text, this book shows how the English language has been changing in the recent past, and discusses the linguistic and social factors that are contributing to this process.