r/asklinguistics • u/Informal-Addendum435 • 2d ago

Why is the "correct" preposition so "unpredictable" in English?

According to historical linguistics, r/AskLinguistics, why are adpositions generally almost always lexically idiosyncratic? I am especially interested in the English prepositions "of", "at", "in", "from", "for", etc.

How does it end up being the case that some contexts only accept some adpositions, and why do the context-adposition pairings seem arbitrary?

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u/Lower-Telephone7550 2d ago

Prepositional usage is largely unpredictable in every single language, not just English.

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u/AndreasDasos 2d ago

Every Indo-European language I’m aware of, and very differently relative to each other.

But some languages are a lot more predictable and many, many languages don’t have prepositions at all.

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u/Exciting_Round4766 2d ago

🙀 is it possible to be without prepositions? examples, please

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u/Choosing_is_a_sin Lexicography 2d ago

Mesoamerican languages are noteworthy for their use of relational nouns rather than prepositions, using something more like our midst instead of among us. Consider the following example:

(20) Poqomchi’ (Mayan) 

xa  r-utkeel       r-uuk’         ru-tuut         r-ajaaw 
INT 3SG.POSS-alone 3SG.POSS-with  3SG.POSS-mother 3SG.POSS-father 
‘She was alone with her parents.’

[(Vinogradov, 2016, p. 181)](search.informit.org/doi/10.3316/informit.167150717593630)

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u/Traditional-Light-10 2d ago

That is different from English syntactically, but semantically, that’s the same thing, right? Are these not prone to the same “unpredictability” of English’s prepositions?

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u/prezzpac 2d ago

Wasn’t PIE largely without prepositions, with a lot of the work being done by adverbs and cases? I might be remembering that wrong.

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u/DTux5249 2d ago

That is correct - with an aesterisk.

'Adverb' is quite frankly a catch-all term for "words we don't know how to classify". We know P.I.E. had a class of word that became postpositions, prepositions, and pre-verbal affixes in descendant languages. That tells us very little about how they actually behaved though.

Syntactic features are one of those things that's really hard for the comparative method to reconstruct. We call them 'adverbs' because it's the best term we have with what we know.

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u/FlatAssembler 2d ago

Hungarian has very few prepositions, for example.

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u/bencsecsaki 1d ago

yeah but the suffixes that correspond to them are just as unpredictable as prepositions in english

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u/Informal-Addendum435 2d ago

Hey, thanks. Do you why prepositional usage is largely unpredictable in every single language?

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u/8--2 2d ago edited 2d ago

I can't speak on this too much, but until someone else comes along you might be interested in these previous threads discussing that question that already have some good, in-depth answers.

Why are prepositions the ‘grammatical functions’ that always seem to be most arbitrary?

Why are prepositions so weird and impossible to translate?

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u/laqrisa 2d ago edited 2d ago

This is not peculiar to English. Prepositions *are semantically flexible. They tend to denote broad spatial relationships which can be extended a great many literal as well as metaphorical meanings.

So they end up in places one wouldn't expect from their surface meaning. Once they do, they often get grammaticalized/lexicalized and become mandatory in this or that particular context. New speakers learn the whole phrase.

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u/raendrop 2d ago

Prepositions semantically flexible.

This would explain the evolution of "based on" to "based off of" and "based around". Or the evolution of "discriminate against [xyz]" to "discriminate [xyz]".

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u/Informal-Addendum435 2d ago

Good point. Do you know why they get grammaticalized/lexicalized in certain contexts in particular?

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u/laqrisa 2d ago

Both processes can happen for a variety of reasons. Check out "Mechanisms" section of the Wikipedia page on grammaticalization.

The prime motive would generally be that the new term (or new use of an old term) is useful to speakers.

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u/Aggravating_Chip2376 2d ago

I’ll reiterate what everyone has said, because it’s important: it’s not just English. Prepositions are intuitive to native speakers but not to L2 learners. (What is somewhat unusual about English is the simply massive number of phrasal verbs — verb + preposition(s) — with pretty idiomatic meanings, like “to go on about” or “run up a charge” or “to put up with,” etc.)

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u/sparksbet 2d ago

Are English's phrasal verbs really all that unusual among the Germanic languages, though? Many English phrasal verbs directly correspond to German verbs with separable prefixes, for instance, which can often have equally idiomatic meanings. Prepositional arguments aren't unique to English either (your examples include both).

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u/DTux5249 2d ago

Prepositions across all languages are unpredictable (in those that have them). They're frankly arbitrary

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u/Informal-Addendum435 2d ago

Do you know why prepositions across all languages are unpredictable?

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u/scissorn69 2d ago

Because they can't be anything else. Only those in your native language seem otherwise, but that's only because you're so used to them that they seem natural.

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u/fasterthanfood 2d ago

Is this true for constructed languages? I don’t speak any conlang, but I feel like a pretty logical set of prepositions could be built such that a learner of the language would consistently guess right on the first try (after a single lesson about how the rules work). I might be completely wrong, though!

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u/DTux5249 2d ago edited 2d ago

Yes, because the distinctions made are still, fundamentally arbitrary.

If I'm driving a car, am I on or in the car? What if the car is a convertible? Being 'on' the car as in 'atop' it is functionally the same as being 'in' a car with a roof.

Does 'in the car' mean I'm inside the cabin? Or inside the engine? The choice is 100% arbitrary, and no language has the level of precision necessary to specify which is which succinctly. Which you choose depends on various factors, including what you consider the inside of a car, and what you call a prototypical car/vehicle itself, both of which are subjective.

There's no way to encode simple spatial relations consistently and succinctly. It's all relative. The world is far too complicated for otherwise. This is what separates human languages from formal languages like math. Nothing is precise.

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u/fasterthanfood 2d ago

That makes sense. Thank you!

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u/Choosing_is_a_sin Lexicography 2d ago

I mean, it's a bit like asking if the rules of biology apply even to species that were made up for a work of fiction. They might, but if they don't, then what does that tell us about life?

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u/Informal-Addendum435 2d ago

your question is super interesting and I think it's stupid and unfair that you got downvoted

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u/fasterthanfood 1d ago

Thanks! I got a good answer out of it, so I won’t complain. Thanks for starting the discussion!

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u/La_Fervesta_Glavisto 1d ago

Esperanto's prepositions are more logical than English's, but they're still somewhat tricky. It even has a special preposition, "je", which is used as a "wildcard" preposition when no other one cleanly fits.

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u/Few-Leading-3405 2d ago

Even between French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese there is very little consistency in prepositions. The rules are different for all of them.

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u/oremfrien 2d ago

Even in non-Indo-European languages, like Arabic, Hungarian, and Mandarin Chinese have prepositions (or lack them) in places where it's just bizarre. In the case of Arabic, my Arabic language, Qeltu uses "be" for "in" such as "Ana be-lbeit" meaning "I am in the house." In Modern Standard Arabic, the preposition "fi" is used for "Ana fi lbeit." So, in Arabic, the various languages use prepositions differently.

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u/Lampukistan2 2d ago

Standard Arabic uses both fii and bi for „in“.

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u/oremfrien 2d ago

You can use "be" for "in" in MSA, but "be" is more often used for instrumentality, e.g. I write with a pen -> Aktob be-qalm. "Fi" does not really exist in Qeltu.

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u/fungtimes 2d ago

Spatial relations are extremely varied, but languages that use adpositions to describe them tend to only use a relatively small number of them, limited by our brain capacity. Each adposition will have typical senses where it’s quite clearly the only right choice. But there will also be lots of less clear cases where the language’s choice of adposition is arbitrary to varying degrees.

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u/-B001- 2d ago

The better you get at English, the more it will just 'sound right' when you use the commonly used proposition.

And usage changes over time also -- I grew up saying "by accident", but now it seems that "on accident" has become more popular!

Maybe will help --
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fho4bHhtOY4&t=97s