My (Russian) fiancee is trying to improve and correct her English.
One area she has difficulty with is prepositions (specifically ‘in’, ‘on’, and ‘at’). One difficulty that I’ve just realized is that there seems to be some different zoom levels at which these are used. (Examples at the end of the post.)
My questions are:
a) What is this called?
b) Is there a good (ideally Russian) explanation for it, somewhere?
c) And, more importantly, is there a good course or set of exercises that specialize in this?
Examples:
Universal Zoom Level
I live on Earth
I live in the Northern Hemisphere
I live at Latitude: 37.2343 Longitude: -115.8067
Earth Zoom Level
I live in America
I live on the Sun Belt
I live at the Western Edge of the Sun Belt
State Zoom Level
I live in Nevada
I live on a base.
I live at Area 51
Base Zoom Level
I live in a bunker.
I live on set of pipes that bring down air and water from above.
I live at the bottom, behind all the steel doors.
To give a shorter example, there’s the same issue with time:
I’ll see you on Friday evening!
I’ll see you in the evening!
In the latter example, I believe, we’ve zoomed in on the day, so “evening” has switched over from “on” to “in” because it’s gone up in size to the largest sub-unit of the day.
Not sure I understand your rule. What is the difference between “in London” and “at London”? “On the sea” versus “at sea”? In the street versus on the street?
There are some primary senses which may correspond with your “zoom levels”: “in” refers to something having some extent in space (therefore an inside), “at” to a point, and “on” to two things in contact, especially being supported by something.
There are many examples in a good English dictionary like the OED, but it does not explain the correspondence with Russian prepositions (or German, or Swedish…)
I’d say “in” for this one myself, since the Sun Belt is so large. I’d only say “on” if the Sun Belt were a more like an actual belt, perhaps long but rather thin so that “on” is determining your location more finely.
I should clarify that my question is what it’s called when you apply different zoom levels to prepositions of place and time.
That’s the difficulty is that sometimes a thing will be “on” and other times the same word will end up as “in” because we’ve switched the implicit level at which we’re visualizing the topic.
I live in the lakes region.
I live on a lake in Utah.
I live at my lake house in the summer and at my mountain house in the winter.
Her English language classes don’t seem to really explain how it can be that you end up using different prepositions for the same thing and, so far as I can figure it, it seems to be that it switches over based on an implicit level of zoom that we’re visualizing the topic at.
It’s not just enough to practice a few examples, like her books do, but you also need to think of it in those terms. And, I would think, someone would have given it a name.
The most helpful explanation that I have encountered is that you can visualize “in” as referring to a point inside a bounded area (like a rectangle, circle, or blob outline), “on” references a point on a line (including squiggly lines), and “at” is just a point.
In is always used for the largest level of granularity and at is always the smallest and very precise. You can use the same “at” at almost every level of zoom (e.g. an address or GPS coordinates) because a point is precise. “in” changes depending on the zoom level. “on” is always between the two.
“on” is a lot more tricky to use because you have to find something that runs in a line like a mountain range, a road, or a set of pipes.
That said, occasionally that doesn’t seem to work, like the case where I say that I live on a base. But my guess would be that it comes from the same thing as living on the 2nd floor; we’re considering a side view so the “base” is just a line that you can either live on, above, or under. Why English visualizes bases in that way, I don’t know, but that seems to be the norm and that’s what she needs help practicing.
The 7esl site earlier had a “zoom chart” if you scroll down:
But are you sure these are regular rules, not just irregular conventions speakers pick up by rote habit?
For example, even in that chart, we are “in a car” (small) but “at the train station” (huge). English is full of irregularities/ambiguities, one of the things that make it hard for foreign learners. Other examples…
“I live at the base” / I live on base
“I live at the bunker” / I live in a bunker
“I live in the bottom, after all the steel doors” / I live at the bottom
It also depends on the verb used.
“I live on a farm”
“I was at a farm”
“In school today, we learned…”
“There was another shooting at school today…”
not necessarily. In and on also retain their basic meanings… “on” means sitting above. “in” means inside, within. I live on the second floor. I live in an apartment building. But there are idiom-specific uses too… I am on fire. The dog is in heat. On the street means alongside it, while in the street implies in the middle of the road where traffic will run you over (or colloquially too, on the sidewalk) - whereas roadkill could be on the street or in the street, but the painted lines would be on the street, again “on top of”. Arrow are “on target” even though they penetrate it. Areas - the USA, the Sun Belt, typically encompass the whole rather than being just a surface, so we live “in” them.
I suspect like many languages, English is full of idiomatic uses with no sharp rules to define use. Not using the correct idiom or article can give away a person’s foreign origins.
No, but it does mostly work, so far as I can think of. Try using “on” at the “Earth Zoom Level”, for example, without finding something that can be visualized as a line.
Used when we’re off the base, so our zoom level is probably large enough to include the whole town and all of its buildings. You’re indicating a specific building.
You can’t say this without either being on the base or having previously said something to make it clear that we’re discussing the base. If I meet you in an airport in California, having not seen you in 10 years and having no idea where you live, that you’re a soldier (or alien), etc. and I ask, “Hey, where are you living now?” You would not reply back, “I live at the bunker.” To get to that point, our brains need to get settled into the fact that we’re discussing the layout of the base and nothing external to it, first.
At the bottom - We’re visualizing a gaping hole and a point at the bottom of that opening.
I live in the bottom, after the steel doors - We’re establishing the zoom level for the rest of the conversation. In essence saying, “The largest zoom level is my room. After this point, assume that I’m talking with that as our basis for reference.” You could continue on to say, after this sentence, “There’s a kitchen in the corner.” Whereas with, “I live at the bottom. There’s a kitchen in the corner.” It sounds a little strange, because you haven’t established that there’s a room.
[ol]
[li]As far as I can tell, in linguistics there is no single term for this. It’s referred to in various ways, such the conceptual semantics of prepositions, etc.[/li][li]In the practice of English language instruction, there is no single term for this idea of “zoom” level, either. It’s simply referred to with phrases such as, “preposition of locations - addresses,” etc.[/li][li]Most importantly: Something your fiancee (and you) should know: Prepositions are the last thing which are accurately acquired by English learners. This is because–while they do generally follow semantic patterns–they also are often simply conventionalized and often effectively arbitrary from the learner’s perspective. To try to improve your English by analyzing some kind of system of “zoom levels” is HIGHLY INEFFICIENT and generally a useless waste of time. I’ve known (non-native English speaker) PhD students at UCLA (in the department of linguistics, no less) who still needed a native speaker to check prepositions on their dissertations. There are much more effective ways of learning prepositions than analyzing or “thinking” about it. The reason an English class doesn’t provide some kind of comprehensive explanation for prepositions is that it usually doesn’t help much. When people are using language in context, especially in real time speech, the cognitive functions for accurate production are generally not analytical, but automatic. So better ways to learn prepositions would be simply to read a lot, and listen/watch conversational English in films with subtitles in English, for example. [/li][li]That said, you can find lots of English language learner materials which categorize these “zoom” levels with visuals, without having any particular name for “zoom” level, and they work just as well.[/li][/ol]
This video, for example, goes over one such chart, and even includes a mention of a missing (“arbitrary”) exception (at the airport), but it doesn’t actually refer to the concept of levels with any particular term. Probably the closest thing to the idea of “zoom level” would simply be “level of specificity.”
However, it doesn’t include a few other (“arbitrary”) exceptions such as in the evening, which by this “logic” should be *on/at the evening, or that we use terms such as this evening, this morning, last night, etc., as adverb expressions, rather than with prepositional phrases.
I see it’s similar to the one mentioned by Reply, above, which is more detailed, but which also doesn’t use any term to refer to “zoom” levels. As a pedagogical matter, it’s not really necessary.
I grew up thinking prepositions were clearly expressing distinctly different relationships. Then I learned a little Russian, and was amazed at how each English preposition corresponded to multiple Russian ones, and vice versa, depending on context. I think there’s some kind of arbitrary logic behind this that we pick up and apply unthinkingly, and the logic is just very different between English and Russian.
Think back to when you learned to speak English (or whatever language you did learn) as a child. By and large you were not taught rules for this type of thing. That’s because by and large there aren’t rules. It is idiomatic and does vary among regions, but they also convey different things.
Being “in school” could mean you’re a student and you’re nowhere neat the building or it cold mean you’re physically inside the building.
Being “at school” would mean you were physically at the school building, unless you were a boarding student, and then it would more likely mean you were away from home right now for your studies, but you might not be in a school building at all.
This, basically. While there might be some generalizations you can use as an aid to memorize them, by and large I think native speakers just tend to pick them up by repetition.
Is it useful to memorize a rule or just associate certain prepositions with certain times/places over time? Maybe instead of memorizing “school”, just keep saying “at school”? I remember when I was learning another language, the teacher made sure to include the prepositions before every noun on the flashcards, whether that’s “USA”, “Paris”, “school”, “my friend’s house”, etc.
There are so many prepositional collocations in the average vocabulary that if a person tried to learn them all by explicit memorizing they would have to be doing that all day long. It’s not just with general prepositional phrases (a preposition followed by a noun phrase)–you also have the prepositions which collocate with specific verbs (smile at something, disapprove of someone, ect.) They are endless. People don’t just sit down and explicitly memorize prepositions as separate lexical items. They are learned in combination with the other collocated lexicon as a single package, over the course of extensive, meaningful exposure.
