The Grammar Book, Second Edition, is designed to help prospective and practicing teachers of English as a Second or Foreign Language (ESL/EFL) enhance their understanding of English grammar, expand their skills in linguistic analysis, and develop a pedagogical approach to teaching English grammar. | 412 The Grammar Book 3. having Yof X a man of courage a mother of two Thompson was able to assign 61 percent of the instances of of to one of the three primary of was spoken it was most often used for the second meaning. The written samples had a wider distribution of use although still the second meaning was used in the majority of samples followed by the first and then the third. Of the instances of the second meaning most common was its possessive or genitive use . the views of the chairman the umbrellas of Christo and its partitive use . a can of worms accounting for 42 percent of the samples followed by its originating use . the people of Israel which made up 25 percent of the samples. We can see from these last three meanings that of could just as easily be classified as a syntactic marker as it could a word with a lexical We might say that o has grammaticized as a linking element. Indeed Thompson points out that the remaining 39 percent of the occurrences of of in her data which couldn t be assigned to one of the three primary meanings above could be described only in terms of their function or syntax a point to which we return in the Use section of this chapter. Semantics of Case Another approach to the meaning of prepositions is to examine the second of their major functions. In addition to expressing spatial relationships and their extended meanings prepositions can be used to assign case . to mark roles that relate sentence constituents. Fillmore 1968 describes many uses of prepositions as being caselike in nature. We have borrowed his cases and have added a few others that we feel are useful. Note that a preposition may assign more than one case 3 and that only highly frequent prepositions signal cases. We do not claim that this list is an exhaustive one for English cases 1. by agentive 2. by means 3. for benefactive 4. for proxy 5. from ablative source 6. of eliciting 7. of separation 8. of genitive 9. to dative 10.
