Prepositions are the most difficult Part of Speech in English and most languages. In many languages that they act as glue between words and represent spatial concepts.

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Over thousands of years and through millions of speakers words that began as semantic symbols for space, time and direction undergo "semantic bleaching", or grammaticalization, to become more syntactical tools that make connections between words. This "bleaching" of prepositions is largely why they seem so arbitrary (i.e. not following any rules) and require memorization and repetition to master. The words that are selected to serve these roles is done unconsciously by speakers working pragmatically with vague concepts.

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So in English we say "to dream OF someone/thing"

but in Spanish we say "to dream WITH someone/thing".

 

Learners often ask why we get IN a car but ON a bus. However, if consider the concepts, cars are small and require sitting while a bus, boat, train or plane are larger and one can walk around within them or ON their interior surface.

 

In English these spatial concepts appear mostly as prepositions but also as prefixes (pre-/fore-, sub-/under-, super-/over-). Latin used a larger prefix system than old English, but their function is similar. However, English makes up for this difference by being nearly the only language that has phrasal verbs where a preposition becomes part of the verb (postpositionally) to alter the its meaning, much as prefixes alter the nouns meaning.

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More agglutinative languages build the spatial concepts into the verbs where they appear as affixes and become case.​ In fact, the term preposition itself is inadequate as is the entire Parts of Speech categories when looking at many languages and other terms, such as appositions might be used. In fact, if one considers that ending a sentence with a preposition is now very standard in English (I know who you with and where you at) the term preposition itself is inadequate for even English.

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