Adposition

In grammar, an adposition is any of a wide variety of particles and affixes which are attached to a noun phrase (their object) in order to modify the noun phrase or show its relation to another concept or situation in the same clause. Phrases with an adposition as head are called adpositional phrases. Adpositions are classified by their placement relative to their object; the most common kinds of adpositions are prepositions, which precede their object, and postpositions, which follow them.

Adpositions are very often used to form adverbials, particularly in Germanic languages, such as English.

The keys are on the table.
I knitted throughout the day.
They will not be finished until lunchtime.

It is very common for prepositions to determine certain grammatical cases, as in German, Latin and Russian.

Many agglutinative languages like Turkish, Finnish and Inuktitut feature adpositions that are affixed to words. For example, some inflections of the Finnish word auto ("car"):

autossa "in (the) car"
autosta "out of (the) car"
autolla "with (the) car"

Prepositions

The preposition and its object make up a prepositional phrase, which can be used to modify noun phrases and verb phrases in the same way as adjectives and adverbs, respectively. For example, in the sentence "He has a can of lemonade", the preposition is of, and its object is the noun lemonade. These combine to form the prepositional phrase of lemonade, which is used to modify the noun can, just like an adjective would. For a second example, in the sentence "The girl sat on the chair", the preposition is on and its object is the definite noun the chair. These combine to form the prepositional phrase on the chair, which modifies the verb sat, just like an adverb would.

Although the canonical object of a preposition is a noun phrase, there are cases in which another kind of phrase forms a preposition's object. For instance, in the sentence "Come out from under the bed", the object of the preposition from is another prepositional phrase, under the bed. Furthermore, according to some analyses, in the sentence "I opened the door before he walked in", before is not a conjunction but rather a preposition whose object is a full finite clause (he walked in).

In common speech, the object of a preposition may be implied. For instance, "Get in the car" may be shortened to "Get in." One school of thought believes that it is acceptable to treat prepositions as adjectives, nouns, or adverbs, in which case, the "in" in "Get in" acts as an adverb.

In some languages, including English, there exists a phenomenon known as preposition stranding, wherein a preposition may be separated from its object. In English, some people frown on this practice; see Disputed English grammar.

Stephen Fry once concocted a sentence that supposedly ends in eight consecutive prepositions. He proposed that a child whose mother brought him an unwanted book about Australia to read at bedtime might say, "Oh, Mother! What'd you bring that book I don't like to be read to out of about Down Under up for?" (In reality, however, "out of" is a single two-word preposition; "Down Under" is a noun phrase; and "up" is an adverb.)

Postpositions

English has a number of common postpositions, such as ago and away (see List of English prepositions). It also forms postpositional compound words, such as "thereafter" and "wherein", a quality which it shares with German and Dutch. Additionally, English uses the postpositional clitic 's, descended from an Old English genitive case ending, to indicate possession. Some English speakers also tend to use prepositions in a way that appear to be postpositions when their objects are interrogative pronouns, such as in "Where to?" or "What for?" However, this is not really postpositional; rather, it is due to the wh-movement phenomenon that occurs in English, in which an interrogative pronoun (the wh-word) is moved to the front of an interrogative sentence, in this case leaving a trace after the preposition.

There is a tendency for languages to be postpositional when the object of the verb precedes the verb in the unmarked sentences (especially the very common SOV order). However, this is only a tendency (Latin is a counterexample, being typically SOV but employing prepositions). The use of postpositions also correlates with the tendency to place adjectives before the noun they modify.

Postpositions are the norm in many languages in Eurasia.

Japanese: densha de "by train"
Korean: Hanguk e "to Korea"
Turkish: evden "from (the) house"
Hungarian: házból "from the house"

Ambipositions

An ambiposition is a less common type of adposition that may occur as either a preposition or a postposition — these are addressed in Libert (2006). An example is English through in the following:

He slept through the whole night.
He slept the whole night through.

Circumpositions

Circumpositions — adpositions with part before the noun phrase and part after — are much less common than prepositions or postpositions. One language in which they are said to exist is Kurdish ^*.

English does have some constructions that may be viewed as circumpositions, though they are not generally analyzed as such:

from that time on (commonly analyzed as the prepositional phrase from that time plus the adverb particle on)
of Susan's (commonly analyzed as the preposition of plus the genitive case or possessive case construct Susan's; sometimes analyzed by prescriptivist grammars as an incorrect variation on of Susan ^*)

Other relational particles

In Chinese, certain verbs known as coverbs express many of the relationships usually expressed by prepositions. Because coverbs appear before the noun phrase they modify and essentially function as prepositions, they are often referred to as prepositions, even though they are lexically verbs and can in many cases stand alone as the main verb.

In inflected languages, prepositions need not be separate words; their function can instead be performed by a system of inflections on nouns called case or declension. Many linguists consider prepositions and postpositions, like inflectional particles, to all mark case. Due to this functional similarity, there is a small amount of contention regarding the difference between a case marker and an adposition. Otto Jespersen contends that the difference is purely related to form: agglutinative languages have case markers, while isolating languages have adpositions. In The Philosophy of Language, he states that "^*here is a fundamental incongruity between the Latin system where the case-distinctions are generally, though not always, expressed in form, and the English system where they are never thus expressed" (p. 178). John Taylor, on the other hand, proposes a definition that restricts case markers to those particles with a nominal profile — that is, the phrase marked by a case marker can serve as a noun, whereas a phrase marked by an adposition cannot.

External links

Predložky On-line by Igor Podlubny — corrects web pages written in Slovak language by inserting nonbreaking spaces between one-letter Slovak prepositions (k, s, z, etc.) and the subsequent words.

Bibliography

Libert, Alan R. (2006). Ambipositions. LINCOM studies in language typology (No. 13). LINCOM. ISBN 3895867470.

Grammar

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