Dangling Prepositions
- In questions: when we ask a question, and the answer is a prepositional phrase, we often put the preposition at the end:
- What are you looking at?
- Who were you talking to?
- What did you do that for?
- In subordinate clauses: when the preposition’s complement is clear from context, especially where there is a relative pronoun or similar, we usually put the preposition at the end of the subordinate clause:
- That’s the girl (whom) I told you about.
- She doesn’t know what she’s looking for.
- The dog I was looking after got sick: I had to take it to the vet’s.
Collocations
Many adjectives always go with just one or two prepositions -the word for this is “collocations”. It’s generally easier to learn the collocations together with the word: rules often don’t apply, are messy, or simply don’t exist.
Most of these collocations are metaphors, so visualizing rather than translating your prepositions can be very useful.
Here’s a list of some especially common collocations:
And another:
Prepositional Verbs
Prepositional verbs are those so-called phrasal verbs that are made up of a verb and a preposition, as opposed to an adverb (find a list here).
What’s the difference between a preposition and an adverb in this context? Forget it -it’s messy and useless.
What you need to know is that there’s one big difference between the two types: the question where you put the Object of the sentence. Check this out:
- With prepositions:
- We’ll get into it later.
- As for my judgment, this goes against it.
- With adverbs:
- You have to hand it in tomorrow.
- We’ll get her back into the band -we have to!
Don’t bother with explanations: always learn these words in context. When you make a vocabulary list, put an asterisk (*) where the Object goes:
- look into * → investigate *
- get * across → communicate *
