Prepositions in Action: Navigating ‘In,’ ‘On,’ ‘At,’ and More for Non-Native English Learners
If verbs are the engines of English sentences and nouns their cargo, then prepositions are surely the fiddly bits of string that tie everything together. They are small, unassuming words— in, on, at, under, by, with —yet without them the entire structure would collapse into vagueness. They do not shout, they rarely carry stress, but they are indispensable. For non-native learners, however, prepositions are often the most slippery of creatures, resisting reason and logic, clinging to habits that seem more whimsical than grammatical. English prepositions, like eccentric relatives, have their own ideas about what goes where, and they seldom care to explain themselves. Consider the trio in, on, and at . On paper, they appear to mark position with a tidy logic: in suggests enclosure ( in the room ), on suggests surface contact ( on the table ), and at suggests point location ( at the corner ). Simple enough. But venture further and the rules begin to fray. One says in the morn...
