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Topic: Preposition

Prepositions often express meanings relating to space or time, and typically appear before nouns or noun phrases (e.g. at home, in the park, before your party).

Y6 GPaS Test: Identify the prepositions

Find the prepositions in a range of examples

Identify the prepositions in each of the following examples. Click on the word (or words) to select or deselect them.

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Y6 GPaS Test: Pronoun or preposition?

In each of the following examples, indicate whether the highlighted word is a pronoun or a preposition:

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Identify the prepositions

Find the prepositions in a range of examples

Click on the words that you think are prepositions to select or deselect them.

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Writing a story with prepositions

Applying knowledge of prepositions to a short story

This lesson looks at how you might use your knowledge of prepositions and preposition phrases to write a short story aimed at children.

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Prepositions in instructional writing

Prepositions are particularly important when trying to communicate instructions about time and place.

The Activity page appears in the menu entitled 'This Unit' in the upper right corner of this page. The Activity page contains one slide: an example of instructional writing from our corpus. You can see that quite precise instructions are given as part of a recipe. It is reprinted below with the prepositions highlighted.

Method

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Prepositions

Prepositions are a closed class of words. They are generally quite short words that often relate to meanings of place and time.

The following are common prepositions:

  • about, above, across, after, at, before, below, by, down, during, excluding, for, from, in, into, near, of, off, on, onto, outside, through, to, towards, under, up, upon, with, within, without

This is not a complete list.

Some prepositions are made up of more than one word:

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Englicious (C) Survey of English Usage, UCL, 2012-21 | Supported by the AHRC and EPSRC. | Privacy | Cookies