Ice Cube is a famous rap music artist.
The Lumineers are a famous folk rock group.
Everyday Grammar: Verbs and Prepositions
While The Lumineers and Ice Cube might be musically different, they both can teach you something about English grammar.
Today, we will explore some of the grammar used in the works of these performers.
But first, we start with a few definitions.
Verbs and Prepositions
In recent Everyday Grammar stories, we have explored phrasal verbs – expressions that have a verb and a particle. A particle is a short word.
Phrasal verbs are idiomatic. They mean something different than what the individual words suggest.
Today, we will explore a related subject: verbs and prepositions that appear together in the same sentence. These verbs and prepositions might look like phrasal verbs, but they are not idiomatic.
On this program, we will look at how English speakers use two common verb and preposition combinations: "ask about" and "ask for."
Ask about
Our first example is "ask about." "Ask" is the verb and "about" is the preposition.
You can think of "ask about" as a kind of curious group of words.
What do curious people do? They "ask about" something – information, advice, and so on.
How does one use "ask about?" Let us listen to an exchange between English speakers. The subject of their friendly chat: gossip.
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