Why is “despite” a preposition? My 7th Grade English teacher explained to us that a preposition was “Anywhere a squirrel can go.” Today I tutor ESL students in writing, and we went to the Bedford Handbook to fully explore the nuances of the preposition. They had a small-but-comprehensive list, and “despite” was among them. Why? A squirrel can’t go “despite!”
A squirrel can’t go “of”, either. Your 7th grade English teacher gave you an, at best, rather misleading definition of preposition. But then, most English teachers give, at best, rather misleading definitions of most lexical categories (aka, “parts of speech”). [At worst, we’d call them simply erroneous]
A word’s lexical category doesn’t describe its semantic properties; it’s not a description of what kinds of things the word signifies. It’s just a description of its syntactic properties; what kinds of positions in what sentence forms can that word go in.
The word “despite” can go in basically the same kinds of positions in the same sentence forms as the other archetypal prepositions; they all serve to head prepositional phrases, such as “into the house” or “despite its hunger” or “of its own free will” or “without any particular reason to do so”, which in turn, in addition to their structural similarity in terms of the rules governing their construction, can go in basically the same kinds of positions in the same sentence forms. You can say “The squirrel ran into the house” or “The squirrel ran despite its hunger” or “The squirrel ran without any particular reason to do so”, and you can demonstrate similar grammatical interchangeability with various other constructions employing such words and phrases. The syntactic distribution of the word “despite” is just about the same as that of many other words, which as a class we decide to assign a name to, that name being “prepositions”. Like I said, the statement that particular words are prepositions isn’t a statement about what kinds of things these words refer to; it’s not a statement about their semantic roles. It’s just a statement about their syntactic roles.
I’d say the fault lies with your middle school teacher. “Anywhere a squirrel can go” is not a great explanation for prepositions. It only works for prepositions that can have their corresponding prepositional phrases implied and truncated. (E.g. “He hid below the table.” still makes sense when you say “He hid below.” It implies that he hid below something. But “he hid while she counted” can’t be shortened to “he hid while.”)
My sixth-grade teacher, (Mrs. Billingsley, in case you were wondering), taught us to conceptualize prepositions in terms of prepositional phrases:[ul][li]“before the event”[/li][li]“up some stairs”[/li][li]“despite our misgivings”[/li][li]“inside a dog”[/li][li]“without any hair” [/li][li]“for the hell of it”[/li][/ul]A squirrel can’t really go “for.” And “without” isn’t really a place a squirrel can go (at least in the sense it’s used above).
This emphasizes the actual definition of “preposition,” which is a word that describes the relation of a noun/pronoun to another word in the sentence. That relationship does not have to be spatial.
It’s not where the squirrel goes but where the word goes because it is pre-positioned for when the squirrel arrives.
It may help ESL students to substitute “in spite of” for despite.
[quote=“Randy_Seltzer, post:3, topic:501755”]
[li]“inside a dog”[/li][/QUOTE]
:dubious:
Could you use this one in a sentence?
I would normally qualify my statement by starting “as a general rule.” But that’s too limiting. “Without exception” every time a person on this board has quoted school learning about English it has been wrong.
I told my English teacher my dog ate my grammar. He excused me, since you can’t read a book inside a dog. Groucho Marx (& Exapno Mapcase) agreed.
There you go, krokodil–Indistinguishable’s explanation is right on the mark.
And this is another good point you should remember if you’re teaching ESL (or EFL): as a native English speaker, the way you were taught in your 7th grade English class is not the way ESL students are going to learn English. Don’t even try to employ facile, unhelpful explanations like “anywhere a squirrel can go” :rolleyes: with ESL students.
Yes. For some reason middle school English teachers love to give these simplistic, pat, useless and often just plain erroneous explanations. It makes them feel like they’re teaching something.
Most native English speakers (and many non-native speakers) will acquire an implicit understanding of the correct syntactical usage of particular words by way of heavy exposure through comprehensible, meaningful reading and listening.
This the most important thing to emphasize in an ESL situation. Using prepositions to convey spatial relationships comes relatively easy to most learners; it’s the more abstract uses that cause the most difficulty, plus the (often) arbitrary collocations with verbs (e.g., reflect on, have resentments against, approve of, mull over, ect.).
In fact, a study of international graduate students at U.S. universities showed that the correct use of prepositions was usually the last aspect of English that they acquired competence in.
(or “…in which they acquired competence.”)
If you really must give some kind of rule about prepositions, just say that they are typically followed by a noun or noun phrase.