Prepositions of neither space nor time | The parts of speech | Grammar | Khan Academy

Hey Garans, we’ve talked about prepositions of time, and we’ve talked about prepositions of space. I couldn’t come up with a name for these because the following five prepositions are examples of what we would call prepositions that have connotations for neither time nor space. Some of them do have time connotations, and some of them do have physical connotations.

What we’re going to talk about today, however, are the uses of these words—these prepositions—that don’t have anything to do with time or space; they just encode other relationships. Let's get to it. I'll show you what I mean when we say about it.

It can mean you’re talking about a specific subject. So I could say to you, you know, tell me about yourself. The word "by" can be used to denote agency, or you know, doing this. You’ll see what I mean by that. I mean we can figure out who is responsible for something with the use of the word "by."

The book was written by Sudir, so who did the thing? Sudir did the thing; he’s the person with agency, he’s the doer. The word "for" denotes use. So if you were to ask me, for example, “David, what’s a wood chipper used to do?” I would say it’s for chipping wood, for turning wood into chips. Its purpose is chipping.

"Of" has this connotation of belonging or being part of a place. So we could talk about the great Green Dragon of Inverness. Inverness is a place; it’s in Scotland. Are there dragons there? I don’t know; I’ve never been.

And "with" means, you know, together or part of. There goes that snail with the painted shell, you know, which indicates that the snail and the shell are part and parcel; they’re together. So yeah, these prepositions can be used for all sorts of things.

I understand this can be confusing. Prepositions are probably the most complicated part of English, and the problem is you just need to memorize them. But the good thing is that there aren’t that many because, as I’ve said before, prepositions are a closed group. We don’t mint new ones, so you don’t have to be constantly trying to collect more ones or pick them up or figure them out. You have a limited set that you need to master, and the way to do that is to read and listen and talk a lot.

You can do that; you can learn anything.

David out.