All About Prepositions

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

This course will take on the grammatical category of prepositions, which are hands-down some of the most intriguing and beguiling words once you get to know them. (How many prepositions are there in the previous sentence? The answer may surprise you!) We will look at their syntactic and semantic versatility in English and how they vary across languages. We will explore how they denote relations in space and time, as well as many other kinds of meanings. We will see why they are so hard to learn in a second language, and why they are difficult to define in dictionaries and teach to computers. The course will be project-based, including a significant project on a language other than English.