POSITION PREPOSITIONS English prepositions are famous for being difficult. In fact, they are, but prepositions are difficult in all languages. The reason is that they are linking words and they have several meanings. Their use, in any case, is not completely capricious, and if it is, we’ll find the same in other languages. Students of English, for example, complain about “ somebody being on the phone ”, but we must remember that in Spanish “ alguien está al teléphono ” must sound terrible to an English speaker. In this particular case, English favours a preposition that takes into account position on a surface, while Spanish favours one that points at the location of something or somebody (meaning 7 in in the RAE dictionary –Real Academia Española de la Lengua). So far, there is no problem. The problem comes when the prepositions have other meanings. For instance, in Spanish “ a ” is also used to show direction or destination, which implies a verb of movement and...
