IMPORTANCE OF PREPOSITIONAL PHRASES
By Patrick Stejskal
During the research process for the translation of the Languagulity Series, I came to realize that prepositional phrases were an under-appreciated and neglected object of Spanish language education texts. More often than not, we simply happen upon useful prepositional phrases while looking up some other word, and then only when we are poring over some hefty tome of a dictionary, since most pocket edition will omit them for the sake of space. But when we do come upon one, we re always happier for it and wonder how we got by for so long without something so tidy and handy.
Once we experience the eminent utility of these prepositional phrases, the desire to learn more may impel us to venture beyond haphazard discovery and embark on a systematic investigation. Our progress, however, will be frustrated by many obstacles along the way, and our initial enthusiasm may wane.
As we noted, we will not get too far with the standard pocket dictionaries on the market, the favorites of travelers and beginning students. We can return to our four-inch. thick tome, but only then to face the disheartening prospect of teasing these prepositional phrases out from among the thousand-odd pages of tightly woven mesh of diminutive print, a task akin to an act of penance worthy of Greek myth. And even if we are up to the challenge, we may still be disappointed.
On the one hand, we often do not find some of the most obviously useful phrases, since their very ubiquity in our communicating, ironically, renders them invisible to some lexicographers. On the other hand, we may find translation to common prepositional phrases that are nothing short of bizarre, penned by others who, to put it kindly do not get our much.
Then, of course, there is the maddening lack of examples. On occasion, the dictionary will give an illustrative sentence, but then only one, and given the inexorable tendency of language toward polysemy (multiple meanings) and ambiguity, we are left guessing as to the proper context of usage-context is everything, they say, and its slightest shift can make the prepositional phrases cascade into two, three or five alternative translations.
Moving beyond dictionaries, we may turn to the various books of idioms on the market. Many students, however, overlook this resource since they often mistakenly take the term idioms to mean mere amusing linguistic curiosities, something on the order of either street slang or quaint grandmotherly sayings, and thus to be studied only after the real business of language learning is out of the way, like so much sponge cake compared to the meat and potatoes of, say, verbs and nouns.
Certainly, these idiom books are useful to a point, as they often contain many prepositional phrases scattered amidst their entries. Unfortunately, here, too, we find a paucity of examples, Furthermore, in their populist enthusiasm to teach “everyday” Spanish “practical” Spanish, or the Spanish of how “real people” speak, these book often neglect phrases that real people practice everyday in their specialized milieu, be it academic, business, government, scientific or what have you. Hopefully, this series, with its own imperfections to be sure, will move toward bridging some of these gaps and ease the student’s investigations.
Why should we study prepositional phrases?
The back cover of one of those idiom books, which happens to contain a good number of these phrases, promises to “ help you speak like a native.” Such claims merely embarrass the serious, thoughtful student, and betray the naivete of the copywriter told to come up with a catchy marketing lure. The denotation of “native” is innocent enough, but history imbues the term with not so innocent connotations. Sad but true, much foreign language study- specially of Spanish- in the United States and Europe initially had its roots not so much in any well-intentioned desire to learn about other cultures, as it did in the exigencies of maintaining empire. Up through these roots, then, and through the unwitting copywriter´s pen comes flowing the primordial colonialist muck, with its fantasies of “going native”.
Dubious politics aside, such a claim of helping us to “speak like a native” is linguistically, psychologically and pedagogically suspect as well, especially for those beginning the foreign language learning process as an adult. One can never completely unlearn their foreign identity and, fantasies notwithstanding, be taken for a “native”.
But still we are missing the point. What adult students of Spanish really want is not to sound like a “native” , but rather simply to sound like an adult. Prepositional phrases, as we will see, can help us do that.
One of the most common complaints voiced by Spanish students is that they feel like children, able to express but the most rudimentary of thoughts. Certainly, we all succumb on occasion to wistful yearnings to return to the simplicity of childhood, and thereby escape the complicated sophistication of the adult world, but these are, after all, only wistful yearnings. As adults, we traffic in concepts that are, for better of for worse, more complicated and sophisticated than those of children. If we are deprived of our adult linguistic equipment and thrown back on the “simplicity” of childhood, far from feeling any kind of carefree innocence,, we feel anxiety. This anxiety arises from feeling clumsy. Now while clumsiness may be a charming and endearing quality in a child learning to master himself and his environment, it is not so for adults, accustomed as we are to having this control and, like it or not, judging ourselves and others according to one´s agility in expressing and managing ideas. Indeed, our most important daily activities- maintaining relationships and making a living- depend on this ability; without it, we would be as helpless as, well, children. In short, when we communicate, our adult livelihoods and personalities are at stake, inescapably dependent as they are on this “languagility”.
That feeling of clumsiness that necessarily attends language learning can be tolerated- indeed, must be tolerated – but only for so long. If the distance between the student’s linguistic performance in Spanish and her general sense of personal competence is too great for too long, she will avoid situations that face her with that awful breach. Thus begins the vicious cycle: avoidance, no practice and the break widens to even more daunting proportions. At some point, she will despair and abandon the learning process altogether, or else not venture beyond a certain point and so stagnate: best not to expose the integrity of her personality to permanent damage, and instead go in seach of other activities that reinforce the self’s sense of potency.
How do we avoid this outcome? We do it by closing that breach between our performance in Spanish and our general sense of personal competence that we freely access in English; in other words, we must enable our fully-fledged adult personality to exercise and assert itself in Spanish. We might consider linguistic adulthood pragmatically, as the ability to communicate well enough to satisfy our needs. This requires that we render the world, with some degree of fidelity, in all its dizzying complexity. Within the array of resources at our disposal to accomplish this, we have prepositional phrases. Up to now, we have neglected an obvious question:
What on earth is a prepositional phrase?
The very term resurrects the anxious boredom of junior high grammar lessons. Most people have an idea of what a verb or noun is, but a preposition? Until this point I have counted on the reader’s possessing, at least, an intuitive grasp of what a prepositional phrase is, for having undoubtedly already flipped through the contents of the book. But to fully appreciate how prepositional phrases can help us, it would be worth the effort to give a brief and painless grammar review.
A noun, of course, is a word that names persons, things, animals, places, ideas, etc. A preposition is a word that relates a noun with the rest of the sentence. For example Mary is sitting in the chair. Our preposition, in relates the noun, chair, with the rest of the sentence, Mary is sitting. Without this relation word, we have nonsense: Mary is sitting the chair.
The prepositional phrases in the Languagility Series, however, are not so much like the one in our previous example. There, we can freely replace the elements in the phrase and so change the meaning (Mary is sitting in the room; Mary is sitting by the chair). Rather, our prepositional phrases are those that, through time, have hardened into semantic nuggets and taken on a specific meaning that cannot be changed by manipulating its parts. What is more, we cannot even necessarily determine the meaning of the phrase by looking at it elements alone. Few could, upon simply inspecting the phrase “de paso”, confidently conclude, “Well, of course it means while you’re at it”.
Most of these prepositional phrases function as adverbs and adjectives. But what does that mean to us? A subject and a verb, as we know, are the necessary elements for any structurally sound sentence and the basis of clear communication. Without them, we do not have a complete idea ; as such, the subject and verb make up the “ skeleton “ of the sentence. Yet we have not spontaneous urge to reach out and touch, hug and caress a skeleton. What interest us, what irresistibly draws us when all is said and done, is flesh. For example: Katherine is coming. Sure, we have the basic elements of a skeleton, a subject and verb, but our natural curiosity compels us to ask Why? With whom? How, Where? When? How fast? How often?- all questions that can only be satisfied with flesh, that is, adjectives and adverbs.
Generally speaking, adjectives are words that modify, or describe nouns; meanwhile, adverbs modify verbs. In both English and Spanish, we cannot escape the fact that an enormous amount of this descriptive work is done by prepositional phrases functioning as adjectives and adverbs; consequently, these phrases help us describe in ever finer detail people, things, ideas, actions, states and processes in the world -the substance of linguistic adulthood.
Many of these prepositional phrases play another key role in our communication. The talking monkey that we are, we often find ourselves in the middle of conversation, confidently swinging from one idea to the next, when suddenly we find ourselves, in midswing, without a vine to carry us to the next thought. We know where we are and we know where we want to be, but for lack of some means of connection, we are left dangling, or else, we lunge and crash to the ground. What we needed was a conjunction, words that join together sentences, and so, ideas.
While most of the prepositional phrases in this series function as adjectives or adverbs, others serve as conjunctions, Whereas the former performs the material function in communication by providing the stuff of our thoughts, the latter performs the vital formal function, allowing us to join that stuff together in a way that makes sense.
We must emphasize the importance of conjunctions in this respect, for not only do they relate ideas, they also define the exact nature of the relationship. In this way, they help us to precisely render the complex and varied logical relationships in the world. For example, we would not dream of using that most common of conjunctions, and to join all our ideas, as children sometimes do in their endless narrative chains, and…and…..and. This conjunction simply does not hold under the weight of such a variety of logical relationships that occur between our thoughts, be it of causality, simultaneity, concession, condition, correlation, adversity, deduction, etc.
Using these prepositional phrases in our communication may feel unnatural at first, like getting used to post-operative prostheses. This is to be expected, There is little, if anything, “natural” about learning another language for an adult. We are not longer the little language sponges that children are, effortlessly sopping up syntax and semantics as they hurl along without second thought. To be honest, our first halting steps to learn a foreign language are less like those of a child and more like those of Frankestein´s monster.
The “natural” thing for us would be to give into inertia and content ourselves with the loving caress of our mother tongue, which has thus far never failed to satisfy our basic needs. Why on earth should we deliberately muck up a comfortable situation and introduce alien rules, structures and sounds, contradicting the well-established habits that have gotten us by quite nicely, and thereby bring down upon our heads confusion, frustration and feelings of clumsiness?
I do not know the answer, but the fact that we do it suggests that we, at bottom, do not like what is “natural” perhaps because it contradicts our instinct for freedom. By “natural” we usually mean “necessary” , in other words, that which cannot- or really, given our weakness to put a moralistic spin on these things- should not be other than what it is. For whatever reason, we humans like to re-make ourselves, to “morph” as it were, and learning another language is but one of many ways to do this. Aristotle´s definition of art seems apt here: “that which is capable of being other than what it is” Rather than being the “natural animal”, we seem to be more the “artificial animal”, or for those whose vanity is easily offended, we can use the more flattering cognate, “artistic animal”. Why we are this way is beyond the scope of a translator’s preface, but for our purposes, it is enough to recognize it as so.
These prepositional phrases, then once they become “ second nature” with use, add to the communicative freedom in Spanish that we enjoy as adults in English, affording us greater range of motion and nimbleness to engage and negotiate the delightfully and exasperatingly complex ideas, activities and relationships around which we build our lives and personalities.
Before closing, we should admit that, of course, one could get by just fine without knowing these prepositional phrases. After all, we called linguistic adulthood simply
communicating “ well enough to satisfy our needs”. This definition seems to give us the slack to muddle through most situations with the almost right word: just slap on “mente” to a word and you got yourself an adverb that will do in a pinch. But we hear the chastening voice of Mark Twain likening the difference between the almost right word and the right word to the difference between the lightening bug and lightening. The face of your interlocutor illuminating to that right word- the eyes brightening, the brow smoothing, the smile slowly extending- is argument enough to convince us that one of those needs to be satisfied is identification with our fellows, and so well worth that extra effort.
