Background of the Study

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background of the Study

According to Hornby 2005: 834, language is a system of communication used by a particular country or communities. There are so many languages in the world which have their own rules and characteristics. English is an international language used by every country around the world. People in the world study English because they need it to communicate with other people from other countries which have a different first language. Furthermore, we must consider the grammatical structure of the language used. A sentence as a part of the language must be written clearly in order to be easily understood by the readers. Preposition is one of the elements used in making a sentence. “The prepositions are abstract words that have no concrete meaning. They merely show the relationships between groups of words.” Wheeler, 1998:1 Therefore, the use of prepositions has an important role in transforming the content of the sentence. “Preposition in English marks a relationship between a following noun phrase and preceding noun phrase, verb, or adjective. The basic one-syllable forms forms seem to be used to indicate an extremely wide range of different kinds of relationships, suggesting a multitude of different meanings for each preposition. Furthermore, the grammatical uses of preposition are tied to the conceptual meaning of the noun phrases which come after them. There is a key to understanding the uses of the basic preposition. The key can be found in the number of regular distinctions between different types of concepts. The distinctions appear to have their origins in the way in which the complements are located in space and, more specifically, how spatial l ocations are perceived.” Yule, 1998:160. Furthermore, the preposition is the part of grammar in English. Mostly the sentences use the preposition inside to make overt the covert meaning. Prepositions introduce prepositional phrases, and express the relation of position, place, time, possession, manner, etc. Many prepositional phrases seem adverbial in meaning. However, the same prepositional phrases may be used as adjectives, adverbs, or nouns. Quirk 1985, 665 defined that there are two kinds of preposition in the English language. They are simple preposition and complex preposition. Simple prepositions are preposition consisting one word of, to, with, at, in, on, etc.. Complex prepositions are preposition consisting more than one word due to, because of, next to, up to, as far as, etc.. This study chose the Corpus of Contemporary America English as the data source because this word bank contains the examples that is taken from fiction, popular magazine, newspaper, scientific journal and spoken during 1990 until 2012. This study interested to analyze this corpus, especially for the preposition “with”, in order to make the readers understand about the preposition “with” that used by the Corpus of Contemporary America English.

1.2 Problems of the Study