Prepositions

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• Prepositions of time: at, on, in, between, for, since

  AT: designate specific times 

  ON: designate days and dates.

  • E.g.The Australian financial year ends at midnight on 31 June.

  IN or BETWEEN: non-specific times during a day, a month, a season, or a year.

  • E.g. Changes to superannuation legislation were made in September 2007.
  • E.g. Between May 2006 and July 2007, individuals were allowed to make up to $1 million in after-tax contributions.

  FOR:  when we measure time e.g. seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, and years.

  • E.g. The survey ran for 30 minutes.

  SINCE: describe the duration of an action from a specific date or time.

  • E.g. since March 2013.

• Prepositions of place: at, on, in

  IN: the names of land areas, cities, states, countries and continents.

  • E.g. The 2014 G-20 Summit will be held in Brisbane, Queensland.

  AT: for specific addresses or locations.

  • E.g. It will be held at the Convention & Exhibition Centre in Brisbane.

  ON: to designate names of streets, avenues, etc.

  • E.g. The Convention & Exhibition Centre is on Merivale Street, Brisbane.

• Prepositions of movement: to, toward, towards

  TO: express movement towards a place.

  • E.g. He went to the conference on implementation of sustainability in organisations.

  TOWARD/TOWARDS: express movement in the direction of a particular place or outcome.  Both words are interchangeable. However, some references explain that ‘toward’ is more common in American English and ‘towards’ is British English.

  • E.g. towards the top of the summit.

• Prepositions with Nouns, Adjectives and Verbs

  Sometimes prepositions are automatically linked with particular nouns, adjectives or verbs.

  Some examples are:

  Nouns and Prepositions	Adjectives and Prepositions	Verbs and Prepositions
  approval of	aware of	argue for/against/with
  belief in	familiar with	agree with
  confusion about	interested in	belong to
  reason for	similar to	find out