Humanising Language Teaching
Year 5; Issue 4; July 03

Generic vs specific spatial prepositions

Seth Lindstromberg

1 Preamble

Of the 130 or so prepositions that linguists have identified in modern English ¹, some are clearly spatial or spatio-temporal or temporal (e.g., in) and some are clearly not (e.g., than, for).

The class of spatial prepositions can itself be sub-divided in a number of ways, for instance—

• unitary (e.g., in) vs phrasal (e.g., in front [of]]

• transitive prepositions (e.g., in) vs intransitive prepositions (e.g., away)

• readily depictable prepositions (e.g., in) vs ones that are not readily depictable (e.g., with).

2 One particularly important distinction

A too-little known distinction which is of potential use to teachers and learners is that which can be made between 'generic' (or 'general') and 'specific' prepositions, for example—

generic 1	specific
in on under	inside, within, inward, on the inside… on top of underneath, beneath, below

Let's look at under et al. in more detail.

Imagine that you are standing on a lawn. In front of you is a blanket spread out on the grass. In the middle of the blanket is a lump which is there because there is a shoe under/underneath the blanket. There is also a shirt under the blanket, partly under; half of it is visible. As it happens, directly under/below/beneath the blanket is a buried treasure.

Initial comments—

1. Under/underneath the blanket is a shoe.=> Underneath means 'completely or emphatically under'. Because the description above makes it clear that the shoe is completely under the blanket, underneath is a good specific alternative to under here
   
   

2. Also under the blanket is a shirt.=> Underneath would not be apt here because the situation makes it clear that the shirt is not completely under the blanket. Here, under has no apt one-word specific alternative although one could say with perfect naturalness (provided one sleeve were hidden from view), “One sleeve is under/underneath the blanket”.
   
   

3. Further, a treasure lies buried under/below/beneath the blanket.=> Under is usable in (a), (b) & (c) because under is neutral about whether two things are touching or not touching. Below is not possible in (a) & (b) but is possible in (c) because it clearly implies 'not touching'. Beneath is also possible in (c) because its commonest meaning is 'directly below'. So under has two specific alternatives in (c). Underneath, however, does not seem to me to be a natural alternative here; my intuition is that underneath would suggest that the blanket was touching the treasure. Conversely, beneath does not seem to me to be a natural alternative in (a) for the reason that it would tend to suggest that the shoe was not in contact with the blanket but that it was buried…quite near the surface perhaps, but buried nevertheless.

What I have said so far amounts to saying that the meanings of underneath, below and beneath are included within the meaning of under—in other words, that you can always replace underneath, below and beneath with under if you do not care terribly about being specific.² That is almost the way things are, but not quite.

Imagine a hotel. Suppose that the floor plans of the 2^nd and 4^th floors are identical and that the numbering of the rooms is identical too except that room numbers on the 2^nd floor begin with 2 while those on the 4^th floor begin with 4. This means that room 401, for example, is directly up from room 201. Room 220 is on the other side of the building from room 201 and so, therefore, is Room 420..

In other words—

1. Room 201 is under/beneath/below room 401.

2. Room 201 is below room 420 on the other side of the building.

Comments—

• Below is natural in (a) & (b) because it means 'at a lower level than but not necessarily directly down from'.
• Under and beneath are not natural in (b) because they do mean 'directly down from, not off to one side'.

So, if we were to draw a Venn diagram to represent the relative scope of the meanings of under, underneath, beneath and below, the meaning of under would be a big circle. Within this big circle, the meanings of underneath and beneath would be little, separate circles. The meaning of below would be a medium-sized circle partly within the big circle (and including the meaning of beneath) but partly outside the big circle. This outside part would represent the meaning exemplified in (b) in the box just above.

3. Some elaboration about my method

To make the above analysis of the semantics of under, underneath, beneath and below more persuasive, I would need to give lots of examples drawn from a corpus of modern English texts. But this would be time-consuming and it would make this article much longer than Mario would stand for. You can either trust me (since I have been collecting examples of authentic use) or you can look for counter examples and send any you do find to me at SethL@hilderstone.ac.uk. Just note that I have been discussing only literal (not metaphorical) uses of these four prepositions.

I would also like to make the point that even a really exhaustive corpus analysis is unlikely to clarify matters fully. Examination of dozens or even hundreds and hundreds of co-texts for prepositions is not enough. One needs also to know what physical arrangement of objects a person used this or that preposition to refer to on a particular occasion. Words on a page frequently say too little about this. So, if you plan to research the meanings of prepositions, I recommend attending to and taking notes on things that people say in daily life and what they seem to mean by what they say. Or else, you could set up and run some experiments. That is, put a set of objects into various pertinent arrangements and see what prepositions people use to describe these arrangements.

4. The role of the teacher in matters like this

Ignorance about relations of meaning such as those which exist among under, underneath, beneath and below is one of the reasons why so many learners find the English preposition system perplexing.

I have argued elsewhere that coursebooks and learner's dictionaries are of shockingly little help here (Lindstromberg 1999 and 2001, respectively).

It is, therefore, up to teachers to find out about this type of thing so they can supply the explanations that coursebook writers and lexicographers have so far failed to provide. If I do say so myself, there is only one good source of information in print, English Prepositions Explained (1997), a book I wrote for teachers both because there was nothing in existence and because setting out to write such a book seemed a good way of stimulating myself to learn as much as I could in this area.

Note

1. This figure, as well as the observations that words such as than are prepositions (on syntactic grounds) and that prepositions can be transitive or intransitive, comes from Jackendoff and Landau (1991).

2. Or if you do not wish to be emphatic. (Showing emphasis is a secondary function of specific prepositions; see Lindstromberg 1997, e.g., p. 56.)

References

Jackendoff, R. and B. Landau. 1991. 'Spatial language and spatial cognition' in D.J. Napoli and J.A. Kegl (eds.): Bridges between Psychology and Linguistics: A Festschrift for Lila Gleitman. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, pp. 145-70.
Lindstromberg, S. 1997. English Prepositions Explained. John Benjamins.
Lindstromberg, S. 1999. 'Spatial prepositions in three UK-published general English courses'. FOLIO, 5/2: 19-23.
Lindstromberg, S. 2001. 'Preposition entries in UK monolingual learners' dictionaries: Problems and possible solutions'. 22/1: 79-103.