Are prepositions fixed for words?

Question

Is it fixed that words will always take a specific preposition after them?
I am reading a book "High school English grammar". It says for example

The following nouns take preposition for after them. :- ambition, blame, aptitude candidate, match, ...

and

The following nouns take preposition of after them. :- assurance, charge, distrust, doubt, failure, ...

and same for other prepositions

Is that so? I am not a native English speaker but I doubt what is written in the book, I think prepositions are used according to meaning of sentence and are not fixed.

Answer 1

For the most part, your book is correct, but you are right to be suspicious. The appropriate word can change depending on the intended meaning of the sentence in some cases. Here are a few examples:

• I have had a change of heart
  It is a change for the better

• What we have here is a failure to communicate
  This is a failure of epic proportions

• I have the ambition to succeed
  I have an ambition for greatness

Note: it is a good idea to talk to your instructor about questions like this. You may not be required to know all of the special cases right now. Special cases can make the learning process more complicated, so some classes will save them for later.

Wikipedia has this to say:

In ambiguous cases, there is not always a clear rule that dictates which adposition is appropriate, and different languages and regional dialects may have different conventions; the standard usage(s) of a given preposition can be idiomatic. Learning the conventionally preferred word is a matter of exposure to examples. For example, most dialects of American English have "to wait in line", but some have "to wait on line". It is for this reason that prepositions are one of the most difficult aspects of a language to learn for non-native speakers.

For reference, here is the description of adposition used in the same article:

In more technical language, an adposition is an element that ... indicates how that phrase should be interpreted in the surrounding context. Some linguists use the word preposition instead of adposition for all three cases.

Answer 2

The truth is somewhere in between. A few points:

• There are rules of grammar that advise writers on how to write in the "best" way, whatever that may be.

• There is a certain consensus among educated writers about many of those rules. The rules for the prepositions you mentioned are accepted by most of them, or so I believe, though some of the ones I saw have more than one option.

• Even so, many people will break those rules on occasion, either in error or in conscious deviation.

• There are also words that can take several prepositions according to the rules, depending on meaning. Take the word "match" from your example: "we are no match for the English longbows" means we can be easily defeated by them; "that shirt is a good match with your pants" means the shirt is a good fit with the pants; "we will win the match against the red team" means we will win the game against the red team.

• Lastly there are words that can take several prepositions with little or no difference in meaning, according to the rules.

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Note that a prepositional phrase can belong to a preceding noun, or it can be used adverbially to belong to the whole sentence in general.

He was in charge of the whole operation because only he could do it.

The prepositional phrase "of the operation" is closely tied to "charge". In what kind of charge was he? - In charge of the whole operation. In this case, only "of" is possible, because only "of" can be used to express the specific kind of relation between "charge" and "the operation".

I was in charge during the first part of the expedition.

"During the first part" belongs to the sentence as a whole, or to the verb - not to "charge" specifically. In this case, a great many prepositions could be used, because there are many prepositions that can introduce adverbial constituents (in the forest, under the circumstances, after midnight, etc.).

Those rules you quoted do not apply to this: they are meant to teach you special combinations of word + preposition + x, in which the relation between word and x is of such a character that you would expect it to be expressed by another preposition, had you not known that this specific preposition was to be used in this specific combination.