PREPOSITIONS

USO DE LAS PREPOSICIONES

Las preposiciones pueden realizar distintas funciones:
- Servir de enlace entre dos palabras o distintos elementos en la oración:
I'll see you at five o'clock / Te veré a las cinco
- Pueden acompañar a un verbo sirviendo de enlace a su complemento. En este caso, pueden no alterar el significado del verbo o alterarlo con lo que constituyen una palabra distinta.
To look / Mirar (no altera el significado del verbo)
To look after / Cuidar de (se altera el significado del verbo)
- Cuando ponemos un verbo después de una preposición, en inglés normalmente se utiliza la forma ' ing' y no el infinitivo.

You shouldn’t go to India without visiting the Taj Mahal.
No deberías ir a la India sin visitar el Taj Mahal.
I’m interested in studying psychology. / Estoy interesado en estudiar psicología.
Las principales preposiciones en inglés son:

about	alrededor de, sobre	above	por encima de
after	detrás de, después de	among	entre (tres o más)
at	en, junto a	before	antes de, delante de
behind	detrás de	below	debajo de
beneath	debajo de	beside	junto a
between	entre (dos o más)	but	excepto, pero
by	por, junto a	down	hacia abajo
except	excepto	for	para, por, durante, desde hace
from	de, desde	in	en, dentro de
into	en, adentro	like	como, igual a
near	cerca de	of	de
off	de (alejándose), fuera de	on	en, sobre
over	por encima de, al otro lado	since	desde
through	a través de	throughout	por todo
till = until	hasta	to	a, hasta, hacia
under	por debajo de	up	hacia arriba
upon	(poniendo) sobre, encima	with	con
without	sin

Notwithstanding: A pesar de, Regarding: Respecto a, con respecto a, Through: A través de, mediante, por, Unlike: A diferencia de, Toward(s): Hacia, para, Via: Vía, por, dentro, Within: Dentro, dentro de


COMPOUND PREPOSITIONS
 
According to: in the opinion / words of, segun, Along with: in addition to, together with: junto con, As far as: the same distance as Because of: Debido a, por, a causa de; But for: were it not; except for, de no ser por, si no hubiera sido por, By means of: via, by way of, Por medio de, mediante, , Except for: Excepto, salvo, In Spite of: A pesar de, no obstante, Instead of: in place of, rather than: en lugar de, Regardless of: Independientemente de, sin hacer caso de;

We would never have won but for your help.
 

INFORMAL PREPOSITIONS

Because: Informal.(with a noun: because of) (used directly before a noun, adjective, verb, interjection, etc., to convey a very concise rationale, excuse, or explanation): We’re a little like monkeys because evolution.

He doesn’t practice enough: because lazy; I love doughnuts because yum!; I'm contented because toast (por: preoposicion, porque: conjunction)

POSICIÓN DE LAS PREPOSICIONES

Generalmente, se colocan delante del sustantivo o del pronombre, excepto en los siguientes casos:
a.) Con el pronombre relativo, cuando va seguido de preposición, ésta puede colocarse en la posición final.
The girls I study with / Las muchachas con las que estudio (en lugar de: The girls with whom I study)
b.) En frases interrogativas cuando empiezan por un pronombre interrogativo:
Who were you speaking to? / ¿con quién estabas hablando? (en lugar de: To whom were you speaking?)

                              LA PREPOSICIÓN Y LA CONTRACCIÓN

La contracción española, es decir, la fusión de una preposición con el artículo definido (al, del) no existen en inglés. Se traducen siempre por la preposición seguida del artículo definido y separado de ella (al = a el) (del = de el):
Tell it to the chairman / Dígaselo al presidente 


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THROUGH.

1. By the means or agency of:

A dream doesn't become reality through magic; it takes sweat, determination and hard work.

I bought the antique vase through a dealer.

2. Because of; on account of, as a result of:

She succeeded through hard work.

He declined the honor through modesty.:

He failed his exams through not studying enough.

I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.

BY

1. indicating means: Al, por ...

By finishing her homework early, she was able to join her friends

Nobody's going to sell 10 million records by not working hard.

I don't think I miss anything by not watching televisión

The only way to advertise is by not focusing on the product

2. via: using a route

I usually go by New York when I fly to Europe

Hamlet is a play by Shakespeare

VIA (vaia)

1. by way of

She had already heard the news via her fellow students

I'm fascinated with being able to travel the world via 'Instagram' and just be somewhere different

I don't watch a lot of T.V. I only watch things via Netflix, so I only watch the things that I'm choosing to watch.

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Sentence-ending prepositions (Ending sentences with prepositions)

As for editorial content, that's the stuff you separate the ads with.

By and large, the people I'm talking about are Internet users.

Do not squander time; for that’s the stuff life is made of.

Generally speaking, historically in this country, the care of a child has been thought of as female business.

Hey, Johnny, what are you rebelling against?. What've you got?" (The Wild One, 1953).

However difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. S. Hawking

I couldn't walk down any street in Britain without being laughed at. It was a nightmare.

I don't think it's a question of age as much as it's a question of what kind of shape you're in.

I have lived so long among people who do not understand me, been so long accustomed to refrain and disguise myself for fear of being laughed at, that I have grown as difficult to come at as a snail in a shell; and what is worse, I cannot come out of my shell when I wish it.

I hate getting yelled at for something when I'm not the only one doing it ...!

(But) I must say the work I'm proudest of is the Green Cross Code man.

I was never really obsessed with the whole guy thing to begin with

If you love life, don't waste time for time is what life is made up of.

It goes without saying that children should not be given knives to play with.

Journalists, who are skeptical to begin with, simply do not like to be lied to or made fools of.

Learning is remembering what you’re interested in.

Since we're short of money for supplies, you'll have to do without.

Sometimes these folks (Americans) are really hard to get along with. They are either your best friends or your worst enemies. They do not have a middle path at all.

The linguist was embarrassed to admit that he spoke ten languages, for fear of seeming arrogant.

The trouble with talking too fast is you may say something you haven't thought of yet.

The truth is, everyone is going to hurt you. You just got to find the ones worth suffering for.

(The) truth is, I'm not hard to get along with, I just like things done my way.

There are no mistakes, no coincidences. All events are blessings given to us to learn from.

There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about. Oscar Wilde(This is an example of a sentence that should be left with the preposition at the end.)

What are you crying about, Anna? I love you. Everything will be all right. You'll like being married. You will. You'll see.

Sentence-ending prepositions

The “rule” that a preposition should not end a sentence goes back to the 18th century, when some grammarians believed English should bend to the rules of Latin grammar. But like the spurious prohibition against starting sentences with conjunctions, this rule goes against the glorious flexibility of English and often leads to contrived, stilted, artificial, affected or unnatural-sounding sentences.
Ending sentences with strong words is a good idea, but not when it means contorting the language away from natural expression.

Yet the phony rule lives on as an illogical superstition throughout the English-speaking world. As a result, while reorganizing sentences to avoid terminal prepositions sometimes has lovely results, we also get stilted sentences like these:

It was my mother about whom we were most concerned.
California is a place across which you drive but never quite feel a part of.

As with many grammar and usage rules, the question of whether or not to end sentences with prepositions is ultimately a matter of taste. Some readers might think the above examples sound better than the alternatives with sentence-ending prepositions. Neither choice is correct or incorrect.
Great writers have never been hampered by these arbitrary rules, and sentence-ending prepositions can be found in some of the most beautiful writing in the English language—for example:

I say you shall yet find the friend you were looking for. [Walt Whitman]
Mrs. Bennet had many grievances to relate, and much to complain of. [Jane Austen]
Then she remembered what she had been waiting for. [James Joyce]
Mr. Barsad saw losing cards in it that Sydney Carton knew nothing of. [Charles Dickens]
Finn the Red-Handed had stolen a few corn-cobs to make pipes with. [Mark Twain]
There was a little money left, but to Mrs. Bart it seemed worse than nothing, "the mere mockery of what she was entitled to". [Edith Wharton]

Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put. Winston Churchill

He should have written:

"with which I will not put up," (per the old grammar school)

"which I will not put up with." (per the new grammar school of descriptive linguistics)

 It ought to be "...up with which I will not put". The guy's making a joke based on a statement attributed to Winston Churchill (though without any proof). The story goes:

After an overzealous editor attempted to rearrange one of Winston Churchill's sentences to avoid ending it in a preposition, the Prime Minister scribbled a single sentence in reply: "This is the sort of b****y nonsense up with which I will not put."

That is, the normal way to say this is "I will not put up with this" (i.e. I won't tolerate this) and - according to the story - Churchill rephrased it with the preposition at the end to defy the editor who claimed he was wrong to construct a sentence that way (and to show how stupid and unidiomatic the supposedly correct version was).

(Background: it's one of the repeatedly debunked grammar myths that it's wrong to end a sentence with a preposition).

Anyway that grammar rule has held a certain degree of respect in the Anglophone world for quite some time, and this is why we have interesting compound relative pronouns such as:

"at which", "for which", "in which", "with which / whom", "around which"... and so on.

Reword / Re-structure to Avoid

Often, the best solution is to re-word the sentence.

Examples:

• That is a situation I have not considered.  instead of: That is a situation I have not thought of.  
• It is behaviour I will not tolerate.  instead of: It is behaviour I will not put up with.

YOUR CHOICE If you cannot find an alternative without a preposition, you have a choice whether to leave the preposition at the end or to re-structure your sentence.
Some readers will frown at the first example below because it ends in a preposition. The second example sounds, for many people, too contrived.

• She is a person I cannot cope with.
• She is a person with whom I cannot cope.

Either can be used. There are no hard and fast rules on this subject. However, most grammarians would select option 1 when speaking but option 2 when writing.

Were you taught that a preposition should never be placed at the end of a sentence? There are times when it would be rather awkward to organize a sentence in a way that would avoid doing this, for example:

• In some passive expressions:

The dress had not even been paid for.

The match was rained off.

• in relative clauses and questions that include verbs with linked adverbs or prepositions:

What did you put that there for?

(What's the reason why you put that there?

They must be convinced of the commitment they are taking on.

(To take on a commitment: asumir un compromiso)

There’s no necessity to ban prepositions from the end of sentences. Ending a sentence with a preposition is a perfectly natural part of the structure of modern English.

Quotes ending with prepositions.

Verbs plus preposition.