--- title: "English Prepositions Explained. Revised edition — Hirvonen 2011" description: "This is a short book review rather than an original study. 1 reference, cited by 1 paper here." authors: ["Maija Hirvonen"] year: 2011 venue: "JoSTrans: The Journal of Specialised Translation" source: "https://www.jostrans.org/article/view/7479" doi: "10.26034/cm.jostrans.2011.499" licence: "CC BY (journal licence per DOAJ; JoSTrans: The Journal of Specialised Translation)" licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License" canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/hirvonen-2011-english-prepositions-explained-revised-edition/" --- [Elamur Research](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/hirvonen-2011-english-prepositions-explained-revised-edition/) [home](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [papers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/) / [2011](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2011/page/2/) / English Prepositions Explained. Revised edition # English Prepositions Explained. Revised edition **Authors:** Maija Hirvonen · **Year:** 2011 · **Venue:** [JoSTrans: The Journal of Specialised Translation](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/the-journal-of-specialised-translation/) ([The Journal of Specialised Translation 2011](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/the-journal-of-specialised-translation/2011/)) · **Licence:** [CC BY (journal licence per DOAJ; JoSTrans: The Journal of Specialised Translation)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) **Links:** [Publisher's page](https://doi.org/10.26034/cm.jostrans.2011.499) · [PDF](https://www.jostrans.org/article/download/7479/6972) · [DOI 10.26034/cm.jostrans.2011.499](https://doi.org/10.26034/cm.jostrans.2011.499) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W4411426088) **Citations:** 3 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14) · 1 in our library, of the 141,840 papers whose bibliographies we read ## Summary This is a short book review rather than an original study. Hirvonen evaluates Seth Lindstromberg's *English Prepositions Explained* (EPE, revised edition, John Benjamins, 2010), a reference work for teachers, learners, translators and materials writers. The book addresses a familiar difficulty: English prepositions form a small closed class, yet each is heavily polysemous and hard to pin down. EPE takes a usage-based, semantic approach grounded in Cognitive Linguistics. It explains spatial and figurative senses in prose and pictures, uses current corpus examples, and skips rare or archaic items. Chapters gather prepositions around shared meanings such as direction and path or static location. Each preposition is defined by contrast with its neighbours. To test the book, the reviewer traces *in* across the chapters where it appears. She concludes that EPE organises a large, fuzzy domain well and is useful for teaching. She also notes weaknesses: - the grouping logic is sometimes left implicit, - the claimed coverage is wider than the dialects actually treated, - core theoretical notions are explained too briefly. ## Key points - EPE covers almost 100 simple, compound and phrasal prepositions of contemporary British and North American English, with emphasis on frequent short ones like *to*, *on*, *in*. - Its theoretical basis is Cognitive Linguistics, though it is not stated explicitly. Meanings are described verbally and illustrated pictorially, not through grammatical patterning. - Simple *in* appears in four chapters: - Chapter 2 (direction/path) pairs it with *into* and contrasts it with *to*. - Chapter 4 (non-dynamic place) treats it with *on* and *out*. - Some chapter themes have to be inferred by the reader, for example horizontal plane in Chapter 5 and proximity in Chapter 11. The reviewer attributes this to the fuzzy boundaries and polysemy of prepositions. - The reviewer's criticisms: - The book says it covers English worldwide but actually treats only two varieties. - The notions 'Subject' and 'Landmark' need fuller explanation. - She also proposes classifications (pp. 15–19) and the index as aids. ## Interesting ideas - Defining each preposition by contrast with near neighbours (*in* vs *into* vs *to*, *in* vs *on* vs *out*) makes sense boundaries explicit rather than listing senses in isolation. - Splitting every preposition's meaning into a literal spatial core plus figurative extensions gives a structured, graded sense inventory instead of a flat list. - Grouping prepositions under a shared semantic frame (static location vs direction/course of path) separates dynamic from non-dynamic relations. - Describing relations through a located 'Subject' and a reference 'Landmark' gives a uniform two-slot schema for every spatial preposition. - The reviewer tests the book by tracing one ambiguous, high-frequency word through every place it appears, which is a cheap way to audit an inventory's coherence. ## For Mova How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests: - **I1** (frames): Preposition-sense assignment in prag could be framed as choosing among a small contrast set, logging which neighbour was rejected and why, so each spatial role decision stays explainable. - **I2** (world): The world model could store a spatial relation (containment, support, path) as the base and mark metaphorical uses as derived, letting entity states reuse the same geometry for "in trouble" or "in the box". - **I3** (frames): A dynamic/static flag on prepositional arguments would help tell motion events from locative states when building who-did-what-where frames. - **I4** (world): Encoding every prepositional relation as (subject, relation, landmark) would give the knowledge graph a consistent shape for answering "where is X" questions on fables and tales. - **I5** (learn): Evaluation could include per-preposition audits, collecting all parses and frames for *in* and checking whether sense choices are consistent across contexts. *Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.* ## Institutions - [University of Helsinki](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/university-of-helsinki/) — University, Helsinki, Finland · 33 works · 4,705 citations 📚 Shelves (4): [🎭 Arts and Humanities](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/arts-and-humanities/) · 9,296 works · [🗣️ Language and Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/arts-and-humanities/language-and-linguistics/) · 9,206 works · [💭 Psychology](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/psychology/) · 798 works · [💭 Developmental and Educational Psychology](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/psychology/developmental-and-educational-psychology/) · 260 works 🧭 Topics (1): [English](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/english/) · 1,373 works ## Cite Cite as: Maija Hirvonen. 2011. English Prepositions Explained. Revised edition. JoSTrans: The Journal of Specialised Translation. The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. ```bibtex @article{hirvonen2011english, title = {{English Prepositions Explained. Revised edition}}, author = {Maija Hirvonen}, journal = {JoSTrans: The Journal of Specialised Translation}, year = {2011}, doi = {10.26034/cm.jostrans.2011.499}, url = {https://doi.org/10.26034/cm.jostrans.2011.499} } ``` - [← previous The Effect of Automatic Tokenization, Vocalization, Stemming, and POS Tagging on Arabic Dependency Parsing](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/mohamed-2011-effect-automatic-tokenization-vocalization-stemming/) - [next → Experimental Identification of the Use of Hedges in the Simplification of Numerical Expressions](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/bautista-2011-experimental-identification-use-hedges-simplification/) - [↑ back to papers of 2011](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2011/page/2/) ## References 1 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet. 1. Evans, Vyvyan and Green, Melanie (2006). Cognitive Linguistics. An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Evans%2C+Vyvyan+and+Green%2C+Melanie+%282006%29%2E+Cognitive+Linguistics%2E+An+Introduction%2E+Edinburgh%3A+Edinburgh+University+Press%2E) *Updated 24 October 2026*