Friday, May 01, 2015
Thursday, July 14, 2011
TRICKY PREPOSITIONS
Tricky prepositions
YOUR QUESTIONS ANSWERED by FADZILAH AMIN
I REFER to your answer in Mind Our English on April 2, “the boys are playing football on the field”, how do we know when to use on and when to use in?
Is “the cows are grazing in the field” acceptable? Can you explain the usage of in, on, and at.
– LKP
English prepositions are among the hardest items to master in learning the language. A lot of the time, the choice of one preposition over another is determined not by logic, but by usage. That is why a lot of reading is recommended when we want to try and learn a language really well, because we get used to certain natural combinations of words in our reading, without having to learn up hundreds of pages of rules or examples.
Referring to the two sentences above, it is customary to say that people play certain games (e.g. football, netball, rugby, hockey, etc) “on a field” but anything to do with farming or animal rearing uses “in the field”. That is why we say “The cows are grazing in the field.” or “The farmer is working in his field.”
It would take several pages, maybe several dozen pages, to write about the use of “in, on, and at” in English. If you are in doubt about which preposition to use in a certain situation, try looking up a word connected with that situation in an Advanced Learner’s Dictionary and if you are lucky, you may see there some examples of the use of the preposition that you need.
Alternatively, you can do an Internet search with an asterisk standing for the preposition you are uncertain of: for example you can search for “the cows are grazing * the field” (don’t forget to enclose your clause or phrase within double quotation marks).
Meanwhile let me quote from an answer I gave a reader nearly five years ago about the use of “in, on, and at” before certain nouns:
School – “At school” when answering a question such as: “Where’s your daughter this morning?” The phrase also means “attending school” as in the sentence: “Two of my children are still at school.” In American English, the phrase “in school” is used.
Field – “In the field” when referring to a field with crops, such as a paddy field or a wheat field. Usually “on the field” when referring to a playing field such as a football field, eg “The players are already on the field, waiting for the match to begin.” If a field is a meeting point for you and a friend, you can say: “Meet me at the school field tomorrow.”
Hospital – If you are ill and have a bed in a hospital ward, you are “in hospital”. If you are visiting someone there, you are “at the hospital.”
Playground – “in the playground”.
Airport – “at the airport”
Market –“At the market” when referring to a place such as a fish, meat and vegetable market.
Shop – “In the shop” if you’re actually inside one of them. But if someone phones and asks your daughter where you are, she would say you’re “at the shop”.
Farm – Usually, “on the farm”; sometimes “at the farm”.
Sea – We swim in the sea, but we sail on the sea. If someone is on a long voyage, he can be said to be “at sea”, but this phrase can also mean “confused or lost”.
Beach – Usually, “on the beach”; sometimes, “at the beach”.
As far as ...
On May 21, Mind Our English published my letter, headed “American quirk”, in which I referred to an oft-ocurring American practice of not completing the phrase “as far as ... is concerned”, by dropping “is concerned”.
Fadzilah Amin commented that she had not personally come across this American habit. I therefore went on the alert and was rewarded by two articles – attached to this e-mail – which appeared on June 29 in a local English daily.
Venus Williams and Andy Roddick (both are Americans) use the truncated phrase. Williams said: “As far as her game, she does everything well.”
Roddick was quoted as saying, “As far as first serve percentage, I can normally guess within two or three percent.”
I have also collected several more specimens, from the Internet of the use of “As far as ... (without ending with either “is/are concerned” or “goes/go”)
1. “What’s the best wagon today as far as safety and gas mileage?” (ask.cars.com/2008/02/whats-the-best.html)
2. “What is the best car/truck to buy as far as reliability?” (www.answerbag.com/q_view/416560)
3. “As far as motion detection, Dr Paul Miller at the University of Wisconsin indicates ...” www.veterinarypartner.com/Content.plx?P=A&A=2562&S=0&SourceID=69
4. “As far as food, ...” (en.wiktionary.org/wiki/as_far_as)
– I HO
Thank you for the specimens you have collected as evidence of usage of the truncated version of “as far as ...”, especially the quotations from Venus Williams and Andy Roddick which are topical.
I have now found an entry under “as far as” originating from the online The American Heritage Dictionary, with comments that are interesting and fairly long. This can be accessed from the following sites on the Internet. I cannot reproduce it for copyright reasons:
On a less serious note, do you think Venus Williams and Andy Roddick would have won their respective Finals had they been in the habit of using this expression properly?
Correct pronunciation
How should the word “their” be pronounced? Some pronounce it “di ar”, some pronounce it “there”.
According to the dictionary, it is pronounced the same way as the word “there”. However, according to my son’s teacher, teachers in schools are teaching students to pronounce it as “di ar”. If this is not the correct way, why continue doing it? I think we should adhere to good pronunciation from young.
– KATHRYNN
Indeed, “there” and “their” has the same pronunciation. In its simplest form, the pronunciation is /the:(r)/ – with “th” pronounced as in “the” (not “d”) and “e” pronounced as in “get”, but longer. Some speakers of British English, however, use the diphthong “e + schwa” instead of the long “e”, but it is not “ia”. “Schwa” is the vowel sound in the first syllable of “about” and its phonetic symbol is an upside down “e”.
IN OR ON A TREE?
In or on a tree?
YOUR QUESTIONS ANSWERED by FADZILAH AMIN
I WOULD appreciate it if you could explain the following sentences in Ladybird’s Key Words books.
1. Ladybird Book 2b
Here is a tree. Pat looks into the tree. He looks for Peter and Jane. They are in the tree.
(Why is it in the tree and not on the tree?)
A. The kite is in the tree or on the tree.
B. The bird’s nest is in the tree or on the tree.
C. The owl is in the tree or on the tree.
2. Ladybird Book 3a
Some boys and girls come to tea.
A. My friends came to tea with me this afternoon.
B. I went to tea with Nicole this afternoon / yesterday.
C. I’m going to have tea with Chloe tomorrow / next Monday.
D. My aunty came to lunch with me this afternoon.
(Do the above sentences use correct grammar?)
3. Do you have story books suitable for adult (above 12 years old and below 20 years) and published by Ladybird? (Is this the correct way to ask when we go to a book shop?) – Chinese educated
1. “In a tree” is more commonly used than “on a tree”. I can’t give a reason for that – it is how the language is used. Generally, if someone or something is among the branches and/or leaves of a tree, he or it is said to be “in the tree”. If someone or something can be seen on a branch of a tree, he or it is said to be “on the tree.” But this is not always the case.
Peter and Jane must be hidden among the leaves of the tree for Pat to have to look for them, so “in the tree” applies here. As for A, B and C, you’ll have to look at the pictures in the book to decide whether it is better to use “in” or “on”.
I am attaching two photographs and their descriptions: one of a leopard “on a tree” and the other of a panda “in a tree”. The first photograph comes from the site of the Natural History Museum in London, and the second from a BBC website.
2. “Come” is used for movements to a place where the speaker or the person spoken to is, while “go” is used for movements to other places.
In A, the sentence is correct if the speaker’s friends came to tea at his house, and the sentence is spoken in the evening or on the night of the same day.
In D, the sentence is correct if the speaker’s aunt came to lunch with him at his house, and the sentence is spoken in the evening or on the night of the same day.
In B, the sentence can be written either as i) “I went to tea with Nicole this afternoon.” OR as ii) “I went to tea with Nicole yesterday.”
Sentence i) is correct if it is spoken in the evening or on the night of the same day, and the speaker went to tea with Nicole at a place other than his house (“went” is the past form of “go”).
Sentence ii) is correct if it is spoken on the next day and the speaker went to tea with Nicole at a place other than his house.
Sentence C is grammatically correct, whether you end it with “tomorrow” or “next Monday”. This is because the future tense is used in the form of “am going to” before the main verb “have”. The distinction between “come” and “go” does not apply here.
3. It would be better to say: “Do you have Ladybird storybooks suitable for people between 12 and 20 years old?”
Be and being
I WOULD appreciate it if you could explain the meaning of “be” in the following sentences. Is it an auxiliary verb?
1. Be back soon.
2. Be right back.
3. He doesn’t welcome being made up to. What is the meaning of “being” here?
4. Your name ring me a bell. (Is this sentence correct?)
5. Mary upstairs or Mary is in the upstairs.
6. In Mind Our English on Nov 19, the answer given was: “It was Hari Raya Aidilfitri, so my parents had made their preparations to celebrate it. Why does preparations have an “s”?
Is “had” an auxiliary verb? What tense is it? – MOE reader
1. “Be back soon.” is just an informal way of saying “I will be back soon.” “Be” is the main verb here, not an auxiliary verb.
2. “Be right back” is similar in structure to 1) and is an informal way of saying “I will be back very soon.” Again, “Be” is the main verb.
3. “Being” is the present participle (or –ing form) of “be”. “Being”in your sentence is part of a passive verb. The active verb is “making up to” (= praising someone and treating them well in order to get something from them).
“He doesn’t welcome being made up to.” uses the passive form of “making up to”. A passive form of a verb consists of “a be verb (here it is being to go with making) + past participle of the main verb (here it is made up to, the past participle of make up to).
We can rephrase the sentence by using the active verb in the second half of the sentence to make: “He doesn’t welcome anyone making up to him.”
“Being” has at least three other meanings, but they are all nouns. You can look these up in an Advanced Learner’s dictionary, which will give you examples of their usage.
4. The correct expression is: “Your name rings a bell.” This means “Your name sounds familiar – I seem to have heard it before.”
5. Both are wrong. It should be: “Mary is upstairs.”
6. The word “preparations” there is a countable noun, usually used in the plural, and means “things that you do to get ready for something” (Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary).
“Had” in “had made” is an auxiliary verb used with the main verb “made” (past participle of “make”) to form the past perfect tense. The other tense in the sentence is the past simple tense in “It was Hari Raya ...” The use of these two different tenses in the same sentence is to indicate that the writer’s parents had made preparations before Hari Raya came.
IMMIGRATE VS EMIGRATE
Immigrate vs emigrate
YOUR QUESTIONS ANSWERED
By FADZILAH AMIN
By FADZILAH AMIN
CAN you explain the difference between immigrate and emigrate?
2. What is the most appropriate word to use for the Malay word “selit”?
– Vincent
“To emigrate” is to leave your country in order to go and live in another country permanently, while “to immigrate” is to come and live in another country permanently after leaving yours.
So a person who left country A in order to live permanently in country B is considered to have emigrated from country A and immigrated to/into country B.
2. The word “selit” is usually used in the form of “menyelitkan”, which means to slip in something in between other things, e.g. when you slip in some money in between the leaves of a book.
A or an
I attempted this question but answered wrongly. ________ university.
I chose an university, but the answer given is “a university”.
– Kah Kin
We use “an” before a singular noun beginning with a vowel sound, NOT a vowel. “University” begins with the vowel “u”, but is pronounced /yunivesiti/ and “y” is not a vowel. That is why “a university” is the right answer.
In contrast, “hour” is pronounced /our/ and we have to put “an” not “a” before “hour”, because it begins with a vowel sound: the “h” is not pronounced. That is why we say “an hour” and not “a hour”.
Repeating had
I would like to ask you about the past perfect tense in English. As far as I know, past perfect tense is used when we talk about something that had happened back in the past (assuming two actions took place). For example,
1. I told him that I had finished my work.
2. They had left by the time I arrived there.
Could you please enlighten me on using “had had” in past perfect tense in English?
– Daniel
You are right. The past perfect tense is used to distinguish between two actions in the past, or between an action and a situation or time in the past. Your question about “had had” has been asked a few times before, perhaps because of the repetition of the verb “had”.
When the past perfect tense “had had” is used in a sentence, the first “had” is the auxiliary verb that we use in every past perfect tense structure. The second “had” is the past participle of the main verb. So whenever the verb “to have” is used as the main verb in a past perfect tense structure, we use “had had”. Although we seem to be repeating the same verb “had”, each “had” has a different function. Here are some examples of the use of “had had” :
“She had had her lunch when her mother phoned.”
“After the earthquake, the government gave everyone who had had a house some money to help them rebuild it.”
Team Perak
I’m a Sports Officer from the Tunku Abdul Rahman College (TARC) Perak branch campus.
When I lead my branch campus for external competitions or against other TARC campuses I’d register our name as “Team Perak” and also print it on our T-Shirts.
I have seen many examples when the word Team is used in front of a name. For example Team USA in many sporting events, or Team Malaysia as in A1 GP.
I would appreciate it very much if you could enlighten me on the use of the term. Is it only for sporting situations? This is because my students have been laughed at for using “wrong” grammar.
– Hee Chun Keet
I am not an expert on sports terminology, but I have only seen the term “Team” placed before a country’s name and not any other name. These phrases are also mainly seen in websites related to the Olympics and the A1 Grand Prix. Thus there were Team USA, Team GB (Great Britain), Team Jamaica, etc. during the recent Beijing Olympics. The word order “Team + Country” is used in the official websites of several of these teams as can be seen, for example, in the following sites:
Official Team GB Website for Beijing 2008 Olympic Games
The official website of the U.S. Olympic Committee
Team Jamaica at Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremony
In the following excerpt from an A1 Team France website, there is also a reference to Team Ireland.
“With the fourth A1 Grand Prix season completed at Brands Hatch and the title sewn up by A1 Team Ireland on Sunday ...”
I am not sure whether we can use the word “Team” before anything other than a country, like your “Team Perak”. I don’t think there are hard-and-fast rules about this – only conventions and usage.
Also, I have no idea how the convention used in the Olympic Games and A1 came about. Someone suggested to me that since the modern Olympic Games were revived by a Frenchman, Pierre de Coubertin, and since the most important language of the Olympics is French (although English is the second official language), it may be that the names of the teams follow the French word order, ie. noun before adjective. Although the names of the teams all consist of “Team + Country” or “noun + proper noun”, the proper noun indicating the country acts as an adjective, as in “Team Great Britain”, which in normal speech, we would refer to as “the Great Britain Team”.
Are there any readers of this page who know more about this and would like to enlighten us?
The right preposition
I have heard people say “Good luck on...”, “Good luck with...”, “Good luck in...”, “Good luck for...”, and etc. Sometimes, the right prepositions depend on the phrases that follow. Sometimes, more than one preposition is correct. Can you please explain?
– S.W. Low
You are right on both counts.
We say “Good luck on...” when we are wishing someone/some people luck in something that will be happening on a certain day, as can be seen in this excerpt:
Good Luck on Polling Day: Good luck to all Liberal Democrat candidates in the local and London elections on Thursday from the team at ALDC [Association of Liberal Democrat Councillors].
For something (like a sports match) that is going to happen the next day, we use “for” as in:
“Good luck for tomorrow!” We can also say “Good luck for the future!” when saying goodbye to a colleague who is leaving, for example.
We use “in” when someone is starting a new job, for example, as can be seen in the following excerpt:
Good luck in your new job!
guardian.co.uk/media/organgrinder/2008/may/12/goodluckinyournewjobfirs1
We can also use “with” instead of “in” and say “Good luck with your new job!”
“With” can also be used as follows:
Good luck with your move to Portree.
bbc.co.uk/scotland/islandblogging/blogs/005634/0000012005.shtml
When wishing someone good luck before his examinations, we can use “with”, “in” and “for”, but NOT “on”:
Good Luck With Your Exams!
Good luck in your exams: Exam time can be a stressful and worrying time, but here are a few revision and exam tips to help you stay calm, stay focussed and do your best.
shu.ac.uk/ad/aces/goodluck/(shu = Sheffield Hallam University)
And “Good luck for the exams!”
PENELOPE BY PAUL MAURIAT AND HIS ORCHESTRA
This song was a very popular background song for "Drama Minggu Ini" aired in the 1970's and 80's.
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
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