• 3-minute read
• 12th March 2015

Prepositions: How to Use ‘On’ and ‘For’

The image above is a notice we saw in a shop, reading ‘Special Offer for the Fish’. Can you see what is wrong with it?

Sure, it just about gets across the idea that the fish in this shop is likely to be cheaper at the moment. But, to a native English speaker, the use of prepositions would seem problematic.

Preposition #1: For

OK, time to get technical. What exactly is the problem with this sign? It’s all to do with how the preposition ‘for’ is used.

Usually, ‘for’ means ‘with the purpose of’ or ‘intended to be used by’ and indicates the relationship between two words in a sentence.

Here,  though, the shop owner has used ‘for’ between ‘special offer’ and ‘the fish’. This suggests that the fish will benefit from the special offer.

In the same way, we might say:

I have a gift for you.

This would mean that I was going to give you a gift.

The term ‘for’ is wrong in the sign since we can guess the special offer is intended for customers who want to buy fish. Thus, if we really wanted to use ‘for’ in the sign, we’d have to change it to read something along the lines of:

Special Offer for Customers: Cheap Fish!

However, the phrase ‘cheap fish’ is notoriously unappetising. So maybe we should look for an alternative preposition instead…

Preposition #2: On

The preposition ‘on’ is used in many ways. In this context, however, ‘on’ means ‘applying to’, so having a special offer ‘on’ something indicates that the item’s price is reduced. One way to remember this is to think of price stickers, which are often stuck ‘on’ reduced items (although not usually fish).

As such, the sign should read as follows:

Special Offer on the Fish

Hopefully, this has helped explain the prepositions ‘for’ and ‘on’. But there’s one more thing we might want to look at on the sign: the definite article.

Fish? Or ‘the Fish’?

Moving away from prepositions, another potentially confusing element of this sign is the use of the definite article in ‘the fish’.

This might seem odd because ‘the’ usually specifies a specific entity. Thus, ‘the fish’ could imply the offer only applied to a single fish. The alternative would be to use just ‘fish’, which is the plural as well as the singular form of this word. This would make the sign read ‘Special Offer on Fish.’

However, when referring to the food in a shop or restaurant, it isn’t unusual to add ‘the’ before a noun. We might refer to the steaks served at a restaurant collectively as ‘the beef’, for example. As such, use of ‘the Fish’ on the sign is acceptable. It simply means that the special offer applies to ‘the fish’ rather than any of the other foodstuffs sold at the same establishment.