230561 Prepositions (S) (WiSe 2006/2007)

This seminar is intended to give students the opportunity to practice their understanding and use of prepositions in English, which are clearly one of the most complicated aspects of English, especially for foreign learners. The approach will be oriented along the lines of the kinds of mistakes which German speakers typically make, and the work of the seminar will involve doing and discussing exercises in which difficult contrasts (both within English itself and between German and English) are involved. This could have to do with the differences between members of the trio at-in-on or the correspondence between German von and English of-from.

One of the goals of the class is to try to arrive at understandable generalizations that go beyond the discussion and correction of the individual mistake or difficulty. To do this we will also look at prepositions as a word class and contrast them to adverbs and to conjunctions. We will say something about their morphological structure and their syntactic function in sentences, and we will also want to see them as both lexical and grammatical items.

Credit will depend on regular attendance and participation and on the result of a final test.