| Summary: | This article considers the prepositions in the common corpus from a diachronic perspective, focusing on by, of and for, three prepositions inherited from Old English. The corpus yields one occurrence of by introducing an agent, one instance of of linking a characteristic to the object it characterizes, and one instance of for introducing duration. Those constructions are not attested in Old English. A survey of the history of the three prepositions makes it possible to ascertain when they appeared and to explain, albeit tentatively, why they appeared. In Old English, by, of and for had a spatial sense – respectively "beside", "from" and "in front of" – as well as many abstract senses. Of linking a characteristic to the object it characterizes appeared in the 12th century; agentive by and durative for first occurred in the 14th century. Those evolutions were due both to internal processes and to the influence of French.
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