Prepositions: Locators of Place (POST 5)

Instruction

Read the following reading material. 
Pick a partner.
Write down the location of objects in your bedroom (bed, lamp, fan, table etc.) in your exercise book. Then read it out to him or her.
Your partner will then draw your bedroom in accordance to the clues given.
Change role when you have finished.
Head of the class will collect all the drawings to be put on my table in the staff room.
As your homework, produce a mind map for this topic of locators of place.

Reading Material

A preposition describes a relationship between other words in a sentence. In itself, a word like "in" or "after" is rather meaningless and hard to define in mere words.

For instance, when you do try to define a preposition like "in" or "between" or "on," you invariably use your hands to show how something is situated in relationship to something else.

Prepositions are nearly always combined with other words in structures called prepositional phrases. Prepositional phrases can be made up of a million different words, but they tend to be built the same: a preposition followed by a determiner and an adjective or two, followed by a pronoun or noun (called the object of the preposition).

This whole phrase, in turn, takes on a modifying role, acting as an adjective or an adverb, locating something in time and space, modifying a noun, or telling when or where or under what conditions something happened.

Consider the professor's desk and all the prepositional phrases we can use while talking about it.

You can sit before the desk or in front of the desk. The professor can sit on the desk or behind the desk, and then his feet are under the desk or beneath the desk. He can stand beside the desk, before the desk, between the desk and you, or even on the desk. If he's clumsy, he can bump into the desk or try to walk through the desk. Passing his hands over the desk or resting his elbows upon the desk, he often looks across the desk and speaks of the desk or concerning the desk as if there were nothing else like the desk. Because he thinks of nothing except the desk, sometimes you wonder about the desk, what's in the desk, what he paid for the desk, and if he could live without the desk. You can walk toward the desk, to the desk,around the desk, by the desk, and even past the desk while he sits at the desk or leans against the desk.

All of this happens, of course, in time: during the class, before the class, until the class, throughout the class, after the class, etc. And the professor can sit there in a bad mood.

Prepositions of Location: in, at, and on and No Preposition
IN (the) bed* the bedroom the car (the) class* the library* school*	AT class* home the library* the office school* work	ON the bed* the ceiling the floor the horse the plane the train	NO PREPOSITION downstairs downtown inside outside upstairs uptown