"hit in/on/to"

[Lynne Murphy]

Devon Coles asked:
>
>So, aside from slang and idiom ("hit on" meaning to chat up or make
>a pass at, or "hit on an idea" meaning to gain inspiration in
>thought) I haven't been able to make a suitable rule to sort out
>these prepositional Shiboleths that mark the speaker. If this has
>been discussed before, will you let me know where I can find it? If
>not, will you take a crack at it? I need a ready explanation that
>will be accessible to advanced ESL learners.
>Thanks . . .

There is an exercise on this (which contact verbs can take "in") in
both Thomas Hofmann's _Realms of Meaning_ (1993, Longman, p. 222),
which is probably accessible to advanced ESL students (I used it in
teaching English semantics to ESL speakers).

I think a cheap-and-easy way to explain the difference between

I hit him on the head/arm
and
I hit him in the head/arm

is that the 'on' one makes us think of the head as a surface.  If I'm
hit on the head, you'd usually imagine that being 'on the top of' my
head.  The 'in', on the other hand, makes us think of the head as a
three-dimensional thing and we'd probably imagine the strike being
somewhere in the middle of the head--either because the strike makes
an indentation into the head, or because it's a part of the head
that's not the top (say, by the ear or temple).  I think also if you
hit someone on the head with a hand, it's probably an open hand
(surface-surface contact), whereas 'in the head' would be with a fist
(which has less surface and more force).  (This is not to say that
these images can't be cancelled with further contextual information.)

Some  verbs can't take "in" alterations:
I hit him.  I hit him in the arm.
I poked him.  I poked him in the arm.
I broke the vase.  #I broke the vase in the rim.
I hurt him.  #I hurt him in the arm.

This is because the hitting affects a localized area of 'him', but
the breaking affects the whole. (If part of the vase is broken, then
the entire vase is broken.)  For that, see the above-mentioned
exercise and Beth Levin's _English Verb Classes and Alternations_
(1993, UChicago).  Also, John Saeed's semantics textbook (1997,
Blackwell) handles this a little in the "meaning components chapter,
but that's probably a bit techincal for your students (and I'm not
recommending Levin for your students either!).

Lynne
--
M. Lynne Murphy
Lecturer in Linguistics
School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 3AN    UK
phone:  +44(0)1273-678844
fax:    +44(0)1273-671320