Prepositions

With this lesson we continue our unit on prepositions.

Welcome to today's lesson. As with all our ESL Help! Desk units, the sentences you see below are contributed by other ESL students in college-level ESL classes.

What's wrong with this sentence?
Problem:   They told to me the story.

What's wrong with this sentence?
Problem:   We buy for everybody snacks.

Before you begin the activities, you may want to study the podcast and grammar lesson,
He's Always Talking about Grammar, also in our Library. (This lesson is is open to members only
but membership is free!)

 To review the previous lesson, Prepositions: Transitive Verbs That Take a Direct and an Indirect Object, Part 1, click here.

Part 2: Transitive Verbs and Prepositions, Cont.

As we discussed in Part 1, sometimes the transitive verb has both a direct and an indirect object.

There are rules for sentence structure and preposition use when the verb has both a direct and indirect object.  Today we will learn those rules.

  • When the indirect object is first, do not use a pronoun for indirect object.

    • They  told  me  the  story.
                          indirect  direct 

  • When the indirect object is second, you must use the preposition before the indirect object.

    • They  told  it  to  me.
                     direct indirect

For these sentences, rewrite them making as few syntactical changes as you can. That is, try to maintain the sentence structure of the original sentence.

Problem: They told to me the story.
Solution:  They told me the story.

Problem: We buy for everybody snacks.
Solution: We buy everybody snacks.

In Our Next Lesson.....

In our next lesson, we present practice sentences for you.

Thanks for dropping by this week, and remember to send us your questions about English grammar by way of our blog.

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