Thursday, February 15, 2018

prepositions - When to use "from" or "by"


Which is the correct usage here?


Shaken by the experience, Tom decided to go home.


or


Shaken from the experience, Tom decided to go home.


What rule do we use to know which preposition to use?



Answer



There is no rule.



There are sometimes partial rules; but mostly it is a matter of learning what preposition a particular verb, adjective, or noun takes for its indirect objects. That needs to be learnt just as much as the spelling.


In this case, the iWeb corpus has 82 instances of "shaken by the experience" and 7 of "shaken from the experience". So both are used, but "by" is much more common.


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