| Pages in topic: < [1 2] | In/on a farm? Thread poster: John Cutler
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XXXphxxx (X) 
United Kingdom
Local time: 00:18
Portuguese to English
+ ...
Sorry Nicole, cannot think of a single exception.
| | | | Ty Kendall
United Kingdom
Local time: 00:18
Hebrew to English
| Logic won't serve you here | May 4, 2012 |
Nicole Schnell wrote: Ty Kendall wrote:
I'm sorry, I would NEVER say "in a farm". The only time I've seen it is when "farm" is being used as an adjective:
We are a bit too idealistic, I think. Think about a chicken farm (shudder...): A huge building with lots of animals squeezed into it. They never see daylight. Trials are conducted / vaccines are used IN a farm. Have you ever seen an industrial dairy farm? A huge building with lots of animals squeezed into it. They never see daylight. Trials are conducted / vaccines are used IN a farm.
Sorry again Nicole, but I think this is an artificial distinction. Your logic cannot be faulted, but language doesn't always work like that (and are rarely logical), and in this case, logic has led you up the garden path.
You are thinking of "in a farm building" (as I said before - adjectival use of the noun "farm").
When you are simply referring to the farm as a whole, it is always "on the farm".
"A huge building with lots of animals squeezed INTO it". That's your quote, if you are conducting a trial in this building then yes, you can say "in the building" but the building is ON THE FARM.
The vaccines I give to my sheep are given on the farm. (In the field usually, sometimes in the barn....but always ON THE FARM).
If you really want to understand why, then it might have something to do with the fact a farm is usually an OPEN space (with buildings sure) but often thought of and conceived as by the native speaker as an outdoor type enclosure. So anything that happens there, happens ON it, not in it.
| | | | Emma Goldsmith
Spain
Local time: 01:18
Member (2004)
Spanish to English
| with the "on" crowd | May 4, 2012 |
... but "conducted in" is very common in clinical trials.
"Conducted in Spain"
"Conducted in 2005"
"Conducted in patients with"
"Conducted in a group of"
"Conducted in a rural area"
but not "conducted in a farm". Could this explain the confusion?
| | | | Russell Jones
United Kingdom
Local time: 00:18
Italian to English
Emma Goldsmith wrote:
... but "conducted in" is very common in clinical trials.
Yes Emma, I was also wondering whether this justified an exception (and started writing a "devil's advocate" post) but then decided it just wasn't enough.
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| Definitely down ON the farm | May 4, 2012 |
Yes, it's definitely ON a farm, not IN a farm.
IN a farming business, maybe, but definitely ON a farm.
Here speaks a UK native from a rural background.
Jenny
| | | | XXXphxxx (X)
United Kingdom
Local time: 00:18
Portuguese to English
+ ...
Emma Goldsmith wrote:
... but "conducted in" is very common in clinical trials.
"Conducted in Spain"
"Conducted in 2005"
"Conducted in patients with"
"Conducted in a group of"
"Conducted in a rural area"
but not "conducted in a farm". Could this explain the confusion?
You could also have a trial 'conducted at a centre/university' but yes, 'conducted in' is very common, although plain wrong in this instance.
| | | | Dave Bindon
Greece
Local time: 02:18
Greek to English
In memoriam
This question just wouldn't arise in Greek, since the preposition σε [se] can cover many aspects of location (in, on, at, to, by...).
For the record, I'm yet another vote for "on a farm" in all cases.
| | | | LEXpert
United States
Local time: 18:18
Member (2008)
Croatian to English
+ ...
| "(working) in a cubicle farm" | May 4, 2012 |
is the only oddball example with "in" that I can possibly think of.
It should definitely be "on" a farm.
[Edited at 2012-05-04 18:47 GMT]
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neilmac
Spain
Local time: 01:18
Spanish to English
+ ...
| Circumstances alter cases | May 4, 2012 |
Usually the common or garden collocation is "on", and we mostly tend to think of farms as mainly outdoors, with laughing cows and little lambs gambolling in the fields, etc, ... but we might also use "in", for instance, when describing an intensive chicken farm, where the poor things never see the light of day, or an indoor experimental farm - "To make sure that temperature and humidity in the farm are monitored without losing any data..."...
A clear exception could be when it refer... See more Usually the common or garden collocation is "on", and we mostly tend to think of farms as mainly outdoors, with laughing cows and little lambs gambolling in the fields, etc, ... but we might also use "in", for instance, when describing an intensive chicken farm, where the poor things never see the light of day, or an indoor experimental farm - "To make sure that temperature and humidity in the farm are monitored without losing any data..."...
A clear exception could be when it refers to "in" a group of several farms (Salmonella infection in swine farms from different countries...)
[Edited at 2012-05-04 19:25 GMT]
[Edited at 2012-05-04 19:28 GMT] ▲ Collapse
| | | | Giles Watson
Italy
Local time: 01:18
Italian to English
In memoriam | Specification shifts the goalposts | May 4, 2012 |
neilmac wrote:
when describing an intensive chicken farm, where the poor things never see the light of day, or an experimental farm.
A clear exception could be when it refers to "in" a group of several farms (Salmonella infection in swine farms from different countries...)
If you start qualifying the kind of farm - for example, by referring to a battery farm - then you are shifting the goalposts.
"In a battery farm" clocks up about 90,000 googles as opposed to "on a battery farm", which yields fewer than 70,000, but this is hardly surprising: the underlying spatial notion of a battery farm is the enclosed space of a cage while "farm" on its own suggests fields, a surface area for which "on" is the conventional preposition.
Remember that prepositions of place communicate the way the user wants to present the place indicated: "at" views space as a point, "on" as a surface area and "in" as a volume. Logically, you can be on a farm or at one: for "in a farm" to have any sense requires further shared information, such as the implication of cages used on a factory or experimental farm.
Unless such specification is available to the audience, "in a farm" is confusing.
| | | | Giles Watson
Italy
Local time: 01:18
Italian to English
In memoriam | Place, movement and prepositions | May 5, 2012 |
Dave Bindon wrote:
This question just wouldn't arise in Greek, since the preposition σε [se] can cover many aspects of location (in, on, at, to, by...).
Latin (in/ad) distinguished place and movement in prepositions but the equivalents in modern French (en/à), Spanish (en/a) and Italian (in/a) have all taken advantage of the fact that notions of place and movement can be conveyed by many other means to blur over the distinction.
Ancient Greek had a similar arrangement to Latin (ἐν/εἰς) but, as Dave points out, modern demotic Greek has gone even further and uses only σε (from Ancient Greek εἰς) for both notions.
Speakers of all these languages - and many others - simply don't expect at/on/in to indicate not just place but different ways of perceiving it!
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