Prepositions (or more generally adpositions, see below) are a grammatically distinct class of words whose most central members characteristically express spatial or temporal relations (such as the English words in, under, toward, before) or serve to mark various syntactic functions and semantic roles (such as the English words of, for).[1] In that the primary function is relational, a preposition typically combines with another constituent (called its complement) to form a prepositional phrase, relating the complement to the context in which the phrase occurs.
The word preposition comes from Latin, a language in which such a word is usually placed before its complement. (Thus it is pre-positioned.) English is another such language. In many languages (e.g. Urdu, Turkish, Hindi, Korean and Japanese), the words with this grammatical function come after, not before, the complement. Such words are then commonly called postpositions. Similarly, circumpositions consist of two parts that appear on both sides of the complement. The technical term used to refer collectively to prepositions, postpositions, and circumpositions is adposition. Some linguists use the word "preposition" instead of "adposition" for all three cases.[
Some examples of English
prepositions (marked as bold) as used in phrases are:
- as an adjunct (locative,
temporal, etc.) to a {noun} (marked within curly brackets)
- the {weather} in May
- {cheese} from France with
live bacteria
- as an adjunct (locative,
temporal, etc.) to a {verb}
- {sleep} throughout the
winter
- {danced} atop the
tables for hours
- as an adjunct (locative,
temporal, etc.) to an {adjective}
- {happy} for them
- {sick} until recently
Definitional
issues
There are many different types of
adpositions, and some adpositions can also be classified as verbs, nouns, or
adjectives. It is thus impossible to provide an absolute definition that picks
out all and only the adpositions in every language. The following features,
however, are often required of adpositions.
- An adposition prototypically
combines syntactically with exactly one complement phrase, most often a noun phrase (or, in a different analysis,
a determiner phrase). (In some analyses, an
adposition need have no complement. See below.) In English, this is
generally a noun (or something functioning as a noun, e.g., a gerund), called the object of the preposition,
together with its attendant modifiers.
- An adposition establishes the
grammatical relationship that links its complement to another word or
phrase in the context. In English, it may also establish a semantic
relationship, which may be spatial (in, on, under,
...), temporal (after, during, ...), or logical (via,
...) in nature. The World
Atlas of Language Structures treats a word as an adposition if it takes a noun
phrase as complement and indicates the grammatical or semantic
relationship of that phrase to the verb in the containing clause.[3]
- An adposition determines
certain grammatical properties of its complement (e.g. its case). In
English, the objects of prepositions are always in the objective case
(where such case is available: i.e. pronouns). In Koine Greek, certain
prepositions always take their objects in a certain case (e.g., ἐν always takes its object in the dative), and other
prepositions may take their object in one of several cases, depending on
the meaning of the preposition (e.g., διά takes its object in the genitive
or in the accusative, depending on the meaning).
- Adpositions are non-inflecting (or "invariant");
i.e., they do not have paradigms of forms (for different tenses, cases,
genders, etc.) in the same way as verbs, adjectives, and nouns in the same
language. There are exceptions, though, for example in Celtic languages
(see Inflected
preposition).
Properties
The following properties are
characteristic of most adpositional systems.
- Adpositions are among the most
frequently occurring words in languages that have them. For example, one
frequency ranking for English word forms[4] begins as follows (adpositions in bold):
the, of, and, to, a, in,
that, it, is, was, I, for, on, you, …
- The most common adpositions are
single, monomorphemic words. According to the ranking cited above, for
example, the most common English prepositions are the following:
on, in, to, by, for, with, at, of,
from, as, …
- Adpositions form a closed class of lexical items and cannot be
productively derived from words of other categories.
Stranding
Preposition stranding is a syntactic construct in which a preposition with an object occurs
somewhere other than immediately next to its object. For example: Whom did
you give it to? where to refers to whom, which is placed at
the beginning of the sentence because it is an interrogative word. The above
sentence is much more common and natural than the equivalent sentence without
stranding: To whom did you give it? Preposition stranding is most
commonly found in English,[5] as well as North
Germanic languages
such as Swedish.
The existence of preposition stranding in German and Dutch is debated.
Preposition stranding is also found in languages outside the Germanic family,
such as Vata and Gbadi (languages of the Niger–Congo) and the dialects of some North
American French speakers.
Stranding
and English prescriptivism
Students are commonly taught that
prepositions cannot end a sentence[citation
needed], although there is no
rule
prohibiting that use.[6][7] Similar rules arose during the rise of classicism, when
they were applied to English in imitation of classical languages in which they
were found, such as Latin.
Winston Churchill is said to have written, "This is the sort of English
up with which I will not put,"[7] illustrating the awkwardness that would result from a rule
against the use of terminal prepositions. However, the attribution of this
quote to Churchill is almost certainly apocryphal.[8] The example is also not a perfect example, because in that
sentence, up is a particle of the verb "put", rather than a
true preposition. A correct rearrangement would be “This is the sort of English
with which I will not put up” (preposition in bold), which still sounds
awkward, at least in casual speech.
Classification
Adpositions can be organized into
subclasses according to various criteria. These can be based on directly
observable properties (such as the adposition's form or its position in the
sentence) or on less visible properties (such as the adposition's meaning or
function in the context at hand).
Simple
vs complex
Simple adpositions consist of a single
word, while complex adpositions consist of a group of words that act as
one unit. Some examples of complex prepositions in English are:
- in spite of, with respect to,
except for, by dint of, next to
The boundary between simple and
complex adpositions is not clear-cut and for the most part arbitrary. Many
simple adpositions are derived from complex forms (e.g. with + in → within,
by + side → beside) through grammaticalization. This change takes time, and during
the transitional stages the adposition acts in some ways like a single word,
and in other ways like a multi-word unit. For example, current German orthographic conventions recognize
the indeterminate status of the following adpositions, allowing two spellings:[9]
- anstelle / an Stelle
("instead of"), aufgrund / auf Grund ("because of"),
mithilfe / mit Hilfe ("thanks to"), zugunsten / zu Gunsten
("in favor of"), zuungunsten / zu Ungunsten ("to the
disadvantage of"), zulasten / zu Lasten ("at the expense
of")
The boundary between complex
adpositions and free combinations of words is also a fuzzy one. For English,
this involves structures of the form "preposition + (article) + noun +
preposition". Many sequences in English, such as in front of, that
are traditionally regarded as prepositional phrases are not so regarded by
linguists.[10] The following characteristics are good indications that a
given combination is "frozen" enough to be considered a complex
preposition in English:
- It contains a word that cannot
be used in any other context: by dint of, in lieu of.
- The first preposition cannot be
replaced: with a view to but not *for/without a view to
- It is impossible to insert an
article, or to use a different article: on *an/*the account of, for
the/*a sake of
- The range of possible
adjectives is very limited: in great favor of, but not *in
helpful favor of
- The number of the noun cannot
be changed: by virtue/*virtues of
- It is impossible to use a
possessive determiner: in spite of him, not *in his spite
Complex prepositions develop through
the grammaticalization of commonly used free combinations. This is an ongoing
process that introduces new prepositions into English.[11]
Classification
by position
The position of an adposition with
respect to its complement allows the following subclasses to be defined:
- A preposition precedes
its complement to form a prepositional phrase.
- A postposition follows its complement to form a postpositional phrase.
Chinese:
桌子上 zhuōzi shàng (lit.
"table on"), Finnish:
(minun) kanssani (lit. "my with"), Turkish:
benimle (or "benim ile"), Latin:
mecum (both lit. "me with")
The two terms are more commonly used than the general adposition.
Whether a language has primarily prepositions or postpositions is seen as an
important aspect of its typological classification, correlated with
many other properties of the language.It is usually straightforward to establish whether an adposition precedes or follows its complement. In some cases, the complement may not appear in a typical position. For example, in preposition stranding constructions, the complement appears before the preposition:
- {How much money} did you say the guy wanted to sell us the car for?
- She's going to the Bahamas? {Whom} with?
- I'm going to the park. Do you want to come with?
- French: Il fait trop froid, je ne suis pas habillée pour. ("It's too cold, I'm not dressed for [the situation].")
Some adpositions can appear on either side of their complement; these can be called ambipositions (Reindl 2001, Libert 2006):
- He slept {through the whole night}/{the whole night through}.
- German: {meiner Meinung nach}/{nach meiner Meinung} ("in my opinion")
die Straße entlang
entlang der Straße
along the road
Another adposition surrounds its complement, called a circumposition:- A circumposition has two parts, which surround the complement to form a circumpositional phrase.
- English: from now on
- Dutch: naar het einde toe ("towards the end", lit. "to the end to")
- Mandarin: 從 冰箱 裡 cóng bīngxīang lǐ ("from the inside of the refrigerator", lit. "from refrigerator inside")
- French: à un détail près ("except for one detail", lit. "at one detail near")
- Swedish: för tre timmar sedan ("three hours ago", lit. "for three hours since")
- An inposition is an adposition between constituents of a complex complement.[12]
- Ambiposition is sometimes used for an adposition that can function as either a preposition or a postposition.[13]
- word for word, page upon page, (French) coup sur coup (one after another, repeatedly), (Russian) друг с другом (with each other)
Classification by complement
Noun phrases are the most typical complements to adpositions, but adpositions can in fact be the adjuncts to a variety of syntactic categories, much like verbs.- noun phrases:
- It was on {the table}.
- adpositional phrases:
- Come out from {under the bed}.
- adjectives and adjective phrases:
- The scene went from {blindingly bright} to {pitch black}.
- adverbs or adverb phrases:
- I worked there until {recently}
- infinitival or participial verb phrases:
- Let's think about {solving this problem}.
- insist on {staying home}
- nominal clauses:
- We can't agree on {whether to have children or not}
- full sentences (see Conjunctions below)
Some adpositions could be described as combining with two complements:
- {With Sammy president}, we can all come out of hiding again.
- {For Sammy to become president}, they'd have to seriously modify the Constitution.
An adposition can also, in itself, function as a complement:
- as the complement of a {noun}
- a {thirst} for revenge
- an {amendment} to the constitution
- as the complement of an {adjective} or {adverb}
- {attentive} to their needs
- {separately} from its neighbors
- as the complement of {another preposition}
- {until} after supper
- {from} beneath the bed
Semantic classification
Adpositions can be used to express a wide range of semantic relations between their complement and the rest of the context. The following list is not an exhaustive classification:- spatial relations: location (inclusion, exclusion, proximity), direction (origin, path, endpoint)
- temporal relations
- comparison: equality, opposition, price, rate
- content: source, material, subject matter
- agent
- instrument, means, manner
- cause, purpose
- Reference
In some contexts, adpositions appear in contexts where their semantic contribution is minimal, perhaps altogether absent. Such adpositions are sometimes referred to as functional or case-marking adpositions, and they are lexically selected by another element in the construction, or fixed by the construction as a whole.
- English: dispense with formalities, listen to my advice, good at mathematics
- Russian: otvechat' na vopros (lit. "answer on the question"), obvinenie v obmane ("accusation in [i.e. of] fraud")
- Spanish: soñar con ganar el título ("dream with [i.e. about] winning the title"), consistir en dos grupos ("consist in [i.e. of] two groups")
Subclasses of spatial adpositions
Spatial adpositions can be divided into two main classes, namely directional and static ones. A directional adposition usually involves motion along a path over time, but can also denote a non-temporal path. Examples of directional adpositions include to, from, towards, into, along and through.- Bob went to the store. (movement over time)
- A path into the woods. (non-temporal path)
- The fog extended from London to Paris. (non-temporal path)
- Bob is at the store.
- Fine: Bob is in his bedroom. (in is static)
- Bad: *Bob is to his bedroom. (to is directional)
- Fine: Bob is lying down in his bedroom.
- Bad: *Bob is lying down into/from his bedroom.
- Bob jumped in the water.
- in seinem Zimmer (in his-DATIVE room) "in his room" (static)
- in sein Zimmer (in his-ACCUSATIVE room) "into his room" (directional)
Static adpositions can be further subdivided into projective and non-projective ones. A non-projective static adposition is one whose meaning can be determined by inspecting the meaning of its complement and the meaning of the preposition itself. A projective static adposition requires, in addition, a perspective or point of view. If I say that Bob is behind the rock, you need to know where I am to know on which side of the rock Bob is supposed to be. If I say that your pen is to the left of my book, you also need to know what my point of view is. No such point of view is required in the interpretation of sentences like your pen is on the desk. Projective static prepositions can sometimes take the complement itself as "point of view," if this provides us with certain information. For example, a house normally has a front and a back, so a sentence like the following is actually ambiguous between two readings: one has it that Bob is at the back of the house; the other has it that Bob is on the other side of the house, with respect to the speaker's point of view.
- Bob is behind the house.
Classification by grammatical function
Particular uses of adpositions can be classified according to the function of the adpositional phrase in the sentence.- Modification
- adverb-like
The athlete ran {across
the goal line}.
- adjective-like
- attributively
A road trip {with
children} is not the most relaxing vacation.
- in the predicate position
The key is {under
the plastic rock}.
- Syntactic functions
- complement
Let's dispense with
the formalities.
Here the words dispense
and with complement one another, functioning as a unit to mean forego,
and they share the direct object (the formalities). The verb dispense
would not have this meaning without the word with to complement it.
{In the
cellar} was chosen as the best place to hide the bodies.
Adpositional languages typically single out a particular
adposition for the following special functions:- marking possession
- marking the agent in the passive construction
- marking the beneficiary role in transfer relations
Overlaps with other categories
Adverbs
There are many similarities in form between adpositions and adverbs. Some adverbs are clearly derived from the fusion of a preposition and its complement, and some prepositions have adverb-like uses with no complement:- {down the stairs}/downstairs, {under the ground}/underground.
- {inside (the house)}, {aboard (the plane)}, {underneath (the surface)}
- here, there, abroad, downtown, afterwards, …
Particles
Phrasal verbs in English are composed of a verb and a "particle" that also looks like an intransitive preposition. The same can be said for the separable verb prefixes found in Dutch and German.- give up, look out, sleep in, carry on, come to
- Dutch: opbellen ("to call (by phone)"), aanbieden ("to offer"), voorstellen ("to propose")
- German: einkaufen ("to purchase"), aussehen ("to resemble"), anbieten ("to offer")
Conjunctions
The set of adpositions overlaps with the set of subordinating conjunctions (or complementizers):- (preposition) before/after/since the end of the summer
- (conjunction) before/after/since the summer ended
- (preposition) It looks like another rainy day
- (conjunction) It looks like it's going to rain again today
- unless they surrender, although time is almost up, while you were on the phone
Coverbs
In some languages, the role of adpositions is served by coverbs, words that are lexically verbs, but are generally used to convey the meaning of adpositions.For instance, whether prepositions exist in Chinese is sometimes considered an open question. Coverbs are often referred to as prepositions because they appear before the noun phrase they modify. However, unlike prepositions, coverbs can sometimes stand alone as main verbs. For instance, in Standard Chinese, dào can be used in a prepositional or a verb sense:
- qù ("to go") is the main verb: 我到北京去。Wǒ dào Běijīng qù. ("I go to Beijing.")
- dào ("to arrive") is the main verb: 我到了。Wǒ dào le. ("I have arrived.")
Case affixes
From a functional point of view, adpositions and morphological case markings are similar. Adpositions in one language can correspond precisely to case markings in another language. For example, the agentive noun phrase in the passive construction in English is introduced by the preposition by, while in Russian it is marked by the instrumental case. Sometimes both prepositions and cases can be observed within a single language. For example, the genitive case in German is in many instances interchangeable with a phrase using the preposition von.Despite this functional similarity, adpositions and case markings are distinct grammatical categories:
- Adpositions combine syntactically with their complement phrase. Case markings combine with a noun morphologically.
- Two adpositions can usually be joined with a conjunction and share a single complement, but this is normally not possible with case markings:
{of and for
the people} vs. Latin populi et populo, not *populi
et -o ("people-genitive and -dative")
- One adposition can usually combine with two coordinated complements, but this is normally not possible with case markings:
of {the city and the world} vs. Latin
urbis et orbis, not *urb- et orbis ("city- and world-genitive")
- Case markings combine primarily with nouns, whereas adpositions can combine with phrases of many different categories.
- A case marking usually appears directly on the noun, but an adposition can be separated from the noun by other words.
- Within the noun phrase, determiners and adjectives may agree with the noun in case (case spreading), but an adposition only appears once.
- A language can have hundreds of adpositions (including complex adpositions), but no language has this many distinct morphological cases.
Turkish and Finnish have both extensive case-marking and postpositions, and here there is evidence to help distinguish the two:
- Turkish: (case) sinemaya (cinema-dative, "to the cinema") vs (postposition) sinema için ("for the cinema")
- Finnish: (case) talossa (house-inessive, "in the house") vs (postposition) "talon edessä (house-gen in front, "in front of the house")
Some languages, like Sanskrit, use postpositions to emphasize the meaning of the grammatical cases, and eliminate possible ambiguities in the meaning of the phrase. For example: रामेण सह (Rāmeṇa saha, "in company of Rāma"). In this example, "Rāmeṇa" is in the instrumental case, but, as its meaning can be ambiguous,the postposition saha is being used to emphasize the meaning of company.
In Indo-European languages, each case often contains several different endings, some of which may be derived from different roots. An ending is chosen depending on gender, number, whether the word is a noun or a modifier, and other factors.
Word choice
The choice of preposition (or postposition) in a sentence is often idiomatic, and may depend either on the verb preceding it or on the noun which it governs: it is often not clear from the sense which preposition is appropriate. Different languages and regional dialects often have different conventions. Learning the conventionally preferred word is a matter of exposure to examples. For example, most dialects of American English have "to wait in line", but some have "to wait on line". Because of this, prepositions are often cited as one of the most difficult aspects of a language to learn, for both non-native speakers and native speakers.[17] Where an adposition is required in one language, it may not be in another. In translations, adpositions must be dealt with on a case-by-case basis, and one may be either supplied or omitted. For instance:- Speakers of English learning Spanish or Portuguese have difficulty distinguishing between the prepositions por and para, as both frequently correspond to for in English.
- The German preposition von might be translated as by, of, or from in English depending on the sense.
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