Preposition

PREPOSITION

The word preposition comes from Latin: prae ("before") and Latin: ponere ("to put"). This refers to the situation in Latin and Greek (and in English), where such words are placed before their complement, and are hence "pre-positioned".

In some languages, including Urdu, Turkish, Hindi, Korean and Japanese, the same kind of words typically come after their complement. To indicate this, they are called postpositions (using the prefix post-, from Latin post meaning "behind, after"). There are also some cases where the function is performed by two parts coming before and after the complement; this is called a circumposition (from Latin circum "around").

Prepositions, postpositions and circumpositions are collectively known as adpositions (using the Latin prefix ad-, meaning "to"). However, some linguists prefer to use the well-known and longer established term preposition in place of adposition, irrespective of position relative to the complement.

Grammatical properties

An adposition typically combines with exactly one complement, most often a noun phrase (or, in a different analysis, a determiner phrase). In English, this is generally a noun (or something functioning as a noun, e.g., a gerund), together with its modifiers such as adjectives, articles, etc. The complement is sometimes called the object of the adposition. The resulting phrase, formed by the adposition together with its complement, is called an adpositional phrase or prepositional phrase (PP) (or for specificity, a postpositional or circumpositional phrase).

An adposition establishes a grammatical relationship that links its complement to another word or phrase in the context. It also generally establishes a semantic relationship, which may be spatial (in, on, under, ...), temporal (after, during, ...), or of some other type (of, for, via, ...). 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]

Some examples of the use of English prepositions are given below. In each case, the prepositional phrase appears in italics, and the preposition within it appears in bold. The word to which the phrase expresses a relation – that is, the word to which the prepositional phrase is an adjunct or complement – is underlined. In some of the examples, the same word has two prepositional phrases as adjuncts.

·         As an adjunct to a noun:

·         the weather in March

·         cheese from France with live bacteria

·         As a predicative expression (complement of a copula)

·         The key is under the stone.

·         As an adjunct to a verb:

·         sleep throughout the winter

·         danced atop the tables for hours

·         dispense with the formalities (see Semantic functions, below)

·         As an adjunct to an adjective:

·         happy for them

·         sick until recently

In the last of these examples the complement has the form of an adverb, which has been nominalized to serve as a noun phrase; see Different forms of complement, below. Prepositional phrases themselves are sometimes nominalized:

·         In the cellar was chosen as the best place to hide the bodies.

An adposition may determine the grammatical case of its complement. In English, the complements of prepositions take the objective case where available (from him, not *from he). In Koine Greek, for example, certain prepositions always take their objects in a certain case (e.g., ἐν always takes its object in the dative), while other prepositions may take their object in one of two or more 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). Some languages have cases that are used exclusively after prepositions (prepositional case), or special forms of pronouns for use after prepositions (prepositional pronoun).

The functions of adpositions overlap with those of case markings (for example, the meaning of the English preposition of is expressed in many languages by a genitive caseending), but adpositions are classed as syntactic elements, while case markings are morphological.

Adpositions themselves are usually non-inflecting ("invariant"): they do not have paradigms of forms (for different tenses, cases, genders, etc.) in the same way as verbs, adjectives and nouns may do. There are exceptions, though, such as prepositions that have fused with a pronominal object to form inflected prepositions.

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 (prepositions 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 on, in, to,by, for, with, at, of, from, as, all of which are single-syllable words and cannot be broken down into smaller units of meaning.

·        Adpositions form a closed class of lexical items and cannot be productively derived from words of other categories.

Classification by position

As noted above, adpositions are referred to by various terms, depending on their position relative to the complement.

While the term preposition is sometimes used to denote any adposition, in its stricter meaning it refers only to one which precedes its complement. Examples of this, from English, have been given above; similar examples can be found in many European and other languages, for example:

·        German: mit einer Frau ("with a woman")

·        French: sur la table ("on the table")

·        Polish: na stole ("on the table")

·        Khmer: លើក្តារខៀន [ləː kdaːkʰiən] ("on (the) blackboard")

In certain grammatical constructions, the complement of a preposition may be absent or may be moved from its position directly following the preposition. This may be referred to as preposition stranding (see also below), as in "Who did you go with?" and "There's only one thing worse than being talked about." There are also some (mainly colloquial) expressions in which a preposition's complement may be omitted, such as "I'm going to the park. Do you want to come with?", and the French Il fait trop froid, je ne suis pas habillée pour ("It's too cold, I'm not dressed for [the situation].") The bolded words in these examples are generally still considered prepositions, because when they form a phrase with a complement (in more ordinary constructions) they must appear first.

A postposition follows its complement to form a postpositional phrase. Examples include:

·        Latin: mecum ("with me", literally "me with")

·        Finnish: (minun) kanssani ("with me", literally "my with")

·        Turkish: benimle or benim ile) ("with me", literally "my with")

·        Chinese: 桌子上 zhuōzi shàng (lit. "table on"); this is a nominal form which usually requires an additional preposition to form an adverbial phrase (see Chinese locative phrases)

·        English: ten months ago (ago is normally considered an adverb, but is sometimes analyzed as a postposition)^[5]

Some adpositions can appear either before or after their complement:

·        English: He slept through the whole night OR the whole night through.

·        German: meiner Meinung nach OR nach meiner Meinung ("in my opinion")

·        German: die Straße entlang OR entlang der Straße ("along the road"; here a different case is used when entlang precedes the noun)

An adposition like the above, which can be either a preposition or a postposition, can be called an ambiposition.^[6] However, ambiposition may also be used to refer to a circumposition (see below),^[7] or to a word that appears to function as a preposition and postposition simultaneously, as in the Vedic Sanskrit construction (noun-1) ā (noun-2), meaning "from (noun-1) to (noun-2)".^[8]

Whether a language has primarily prepositions or postpositions is seen as an aspect of its typological classification, and tends to correlate with other properties related to head directionality. Since an adposition is regarded as the head of its phrase, prepositional phrases are head-initial (or right-branching), while postpositional phrases are head-final (or left-branching). There is a tendency for languages that feature postpositions also to have other head-final features, such as verbs that follow their objects; and for languages that feature prepositions to have other head-initial features, such as verbs that precede their objects. This is only a tendency, however; an example of a language that behaves differently is Latin, which employs mostly prepositions, even though it typically places verbs after their objects.

A circumposition consists of two or more parts, positioned on both sides of the complement. Circumpositions are very common in Pashto and Kurdish. The following are examples from Northern Kurdish (Kurmanji):

·        bi ... re ("with")

·        di ... de ("in", for things, not places)

·        di ... re ("via, through")

·        ji ... re ("for")

·        ji ... ve ("since")

Various constructions in other languages might also be analyzed as circumpositional, for example:

·        English: from now on

·        Dutch: naar het einde toe ("towards the end", lit. "to the end to")

·        Chinese: 從 冰箱 裡 cóng bīngxiāng 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")

·        German: aus dem Zimmer heraus ("out from the room", lit. "from the room out")

Most such phrases, however, can be analyzed as having a different hierarchical structure (such as a prepositional phrase modifying a following adverb). The Chinese example could be analyzed as a prepositional phrase headed by cóng ("from"), taking the locative noun phrase bīngxīang lǐ ("refrigerator inside") as its complement.

An inposition is a rare type of adposition that appears between parts of a complex complement. For example, in the native Californian Timbisha language, the phrase "from a mean cold" can be translated using the word order "cold from mean"—the inposition follows the noun but precedes any following modifiers that form part of the same noun phrase.^[9]

The term interposition has been used^[10] for adpositions in structures such as word for word, (French) coup sur coup ("one after another, repeatedly"), (Russian) друг с другом ("one with the other"). This is not a case of an adposition appearing inside its complement, as the two nouns do not form a single phrase (there is no phrase *word word, for example); such uses have more of a coordinating character.