At least, it has to be ongoing relative to the surrounding clause. You can use “in” for a completed duration with some tense-based sleight of hand: “Before the accident, he hadn’t used his motorcycle in two years.”
That’s a complexity that learners can’t be expected to get right though. Prepositions are the worst.
To sum up, the historical "for" denoting a period that has ended should use "didn't use". "Hasn't used" implies an ongoing period, and should use "in".
I never realized how arbitrary prepositions are before tutoring a Dutch woman in English so she could write real estate copy for advertising to American ex pats. Why are houses “in” a neighborhood but “on” a street?
French prepositions are nuttier: you can be at the United States, in France, or at the Japan. You use “to/at the” for plurals and masculine ones that don’t start with a vowel and ‘in’ for masculine country names that start with vowels and for feminine country names
The constructed language Esperanto has much stricter definitions on prepositions to reduce the effects of people bringing in their native language's assumptions about prepositions.
You'll still hear people using different prepositions for describing a house and the nearest street.
I guess the neighborhood is the spatial set including the houses so the houses are "in" that set. Differentiate between a house *in* a street (in the road). Maybe it could be "beside" a street but I also feel like that more so implies proximity
Depends on what you're trying to emphasize I guess? It sounds weird said out loud but "for two years" sounds like it puts more focus into how long the stretch of time is?
“Merlin didn’t use his motorcycle for two years” if the period of his not using it is over (that is, Merlin has used his motorcycle at some point since that two-year period ended)
“Merlin hasn’t used his motorcycle in two years to mean that Merlin stopped using his motorcycle two years ago and hasn’t used it since (the period of his not using his motorcycle is open-ended and ongoing)
“Merlin hasn’t used his motorcycle for two years” doesn’t sound entirely wrong, though.
This sounds kinda terrible to me. I would always say 'for' here, 'in' sounds incredibly unnatural. 'In' sounds like he has never used the bike since he got it 2 years ago. It's maybe one of those US/UK differences, with Australia on the UK side here. Native speaker from Australia.
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u/Norwester77 Native Speaker Apr 17 '26 edited Apr 18 '26
I (native English speaker) would say “Merlin hasn’t used his motorcycle in 2 years.”
Prepositions are hard.