Prototype Theory and Teaching English Prepositions

Introduction For many ESL learners, English prepositions pose a perennial problem, partly because the same lexical item -e.g., the word over -can have a variety of functions (as preposition, noun, adverb, adjective and particle (in verb+particle constructions)) and meanings, and partly because of its diversity in collocational properties. With no generalizations emerging, a common learning strategy then has been to resort to rote memorization. This is obviously a most unsatisfactory situation.