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Adpositions are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations ( in, under, towards, behind, ago, etc.) or mark various semantic roles ( of, for).Huddleston & Pullum (2002), chapter 7. The most common adpositions are prepositions (which precede their complement) and postpositions (which follow their complement).
An adposition typically combines with a noun phrase, this being called its complement, or sometimes object. English language generally has prepositions rather than postpositions – words such as in, under and of precede their objects, such as "in England", "under the table", "of Jane" – although there are a few exceptions including ago and notwithstanding, as in "three days ago" and "financial limitations notwithstanding". Some languages that use a different word order have postpositions instead (like Turkic languages) or have both types (like Finnish language). The phrase formed by an adposition together with its complement is called an adpositional phrase (or prepositional phrase, postpositional phrase, etc.). Such a phrase can function as a grammatical modifier or complement in a wide range of types of phrases.
A less common type of adposition is the circumposition, which consists of two parts that appear on each side of the complement. Other terms sometimes used for particular types of adposition include ambiposition, inposition and interposition. Some linguists use the word preposition in place of adposition regardless of the applicable word order.An example is Huddleston & Pullum (2002) (" CGEL"), whose choice of terms is discussed on p. 602.
In some languages, including Sindhi language, Hindustani, Turkish language, Hungarian, Korean language, and Japanese, the same kinds 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- prefix "around").
In some languages, for example Finnish language, some adpositions can be used as both prepositions and postpositions.
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.
An adposition establishes a grammar 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 a complement and indicates the grammatical or semantic relationship of that phrase to the verb in the containing clause.
Some examples of the use of English prepositions are given below. In each case, the prepositional phrase appears in italics, the preposition within it appears in bold, and the preposition's complement is underlined. As demonstrated in some of the examples, more than one prepositional phrase may act as an adjunct to the same word.
In the last of these examples the complement has the form of an adverb, which has been nominalization to serve as a noun phrase; see Different forms of complement, below. Prepositional phrases themselves are sometimes nominalized:
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 the accusative, depending on the meaning). Some languages have cases that are used exclusively after prepositions (prepositional case), or special forms of 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 case ending), but adpositions are classed as syntactic elements, while case markings are morphological.
Adpositions themselves are usually Uninflected word ("invariant"): they do not have paradigms of the form (such as tense, case, gender, etc.) the same way that verbs, adjectives, and nouns can. 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:
While the term preposition sometimes denotes any adposition, its stricter meaning refers only to one that 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:
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 "Whom 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 me?", and the French Il fait trop froid, je ne suis pas habillée pour ("It's too cold, I'm not dressed for the.") 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:
Some adpositions can appear either before or after their complement:
An adposition like the above, which can be either a preposition or a postposition, can be called an ambiposition.See Reindl (2001), Libert (2006). However, ambiposition may also be used to refer to a circumposition (see below),Gernot Windfuhr, Iranian Languages, Routledge 2013 p. 736. 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)".Vít Bubeník, From Case to Adposition: The Development of Configurational Syntax in Indo-European Languages, John Benjamins Publishing 2006, p. 109.
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 grammar, 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 language and Kurdish language. The following are examples from Northern Kurdish (Kurmanji):
Various constructions in other languages might also be analyzed as circumpositional, for example:
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.Matthew S. Dryer, "Order of Adposition and Noun Phrase", in The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Retrieved 2015-01-01. The Latin word cum is also commonly used as an inposition, as in the phrase summa cum laude, meaning "with highest praise", lit. "highest with praise".
The term interposition has been usedSee Melis (2003), p. 22. The term is used here in French, and in reference to the French language. for adpositions in structures such as word for word, French coup sur coup ("one after another, repeatedly"), and 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.
Some prescriptive English grammars teach that prepositions cannot end a sentence, although there is no rule prohibiting that use. Similar rules arose during the rise of classicism, when they were applied to English in imitation of classical languages such as Latin. Otto Jespersen, in his Essentials of English Grammar (first published 1933), commented on this definition-derived rule: "...nor need a preposition (Latin: praepositio) stand before the word it governs (go the fools among (Shakespeare); What are you laughing at?). You might just as well believe that all blackguards are black or that turkeys come from Turkey; many names have either been chosen unfortunately at first or have changed their meanings in the course of time."
The distinction between simple and complex adpositions is not clear-cut. Many complex adpositions are derived from simple forms (e.g., with + in → within, by + side → beside) through grammaticalisation. 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 certain prepositions, allowing two spellings: anstelle/ an Stelle ("instead of"), aufgrund/ auf Grund ("because of"), mithilfe/ mit Hilfe ("by means of"), zugunsten/ zu Gunsten ("in favor of"), zuungunsten/ zu Ungunsten ("to the disadvantage of"), zulasten/zu Lasten ("at the expense of").Duden: Neue Rechtschreibung Crashkurs ( Regel 11 ).
The distinction between complex adpositions and free combinations of words is not a black-and-white issue: complex adpositions (in English, "prepositional idioms") can be more fossilized or less fossilized. In English, this applies to a number of structures of the form "preposition + (article) + noun + preposition", such as in front of, for the sake of. CGEL, p. 618ff; Pullum (2005); Huddleston and Pullum (2005), pp. 146-47. The following characteristics are good indications that a given combination is "frozen" enough to be considered a complex preposition in English:Quirk and Mulholland (1964).
The word to when it precedes the infinitive in English is not a preposition, but rather is a grammatical particle outside of any main word class.
In other cases, the complement may have the form of an adjective or adjective phrase, or an adverbial. This may be regarded as a complement representing a different syntactic category, or simply as an atypical form of noun phrase (see nominalization).
Some adpositions appear to combine with two complements:
Most common adpositions are highly Polysemy (they have various different meanings). In many cases, a primary, spatial meaning becomes extended to non-spatial uses by or other processes. Because of the variety of meanings, a single adposition often has many possible equivalents in another language, depending on the exact context. This can cause difficulties in foreign language learning. Usage can also vary between dialects of the same language (for example, American English has on the weekend, whereas British English uses at the weekend).
In some contexts (as in the case of some ) the choice of adposition may be determined by another element in the construction or be fixed by the construction as a whole. Here the adposition may have little independent semantic content of its own, and there may be no clear reason why the particular adposition is used rather than another. Examples of such expressions are:
Prepositions sometimes mark roles that may be considered largely grammatical:
Spatial meanings of adpositions may be either directional or static. A directional meaning usually involves motion in a particular direction ("Kay went to the store"), the direction in which something leads or points ("A path into the woods"), or the extent of something ("The fog stretched from London to Paris"). A static meaning indicates only a location (" at the store", " behind the chair", " on the moon"). Some prepositions can have both uses: "he sat in the water" (static); "he jumped in the water" (probably directional). In some languages, the grammatical case of the complement varies depending on the meaning, as with several prepositions in German grammar, such as in:
In English and many other languages, prepositional phrases with static meaning are commonly used as predicative expressions after a copula ("Bob is at the store"); this may happen with some directional prepositions as well ("Bob is from Australia"), but this is less common. Directional prepositional phrases combine mostly with verbs that indicate movement ("Jay is going into her bedroom", but not *"Jay is lying down into her bedroom").
Directional meanings can be further divided into telicity and atelic. Telic prepositional phrases imply movement all the way to the endpoint ("she ran to the fence"), while atelic ones do not ("she ran towards the fence").Zwarts, Joost. 2005. "Prepositional Aspect and the Algebra of Paths." Linguistics and Philosophy 28.6, 739–779.
Static meanings can be divided into projective and non-projective, where projective meanings are those whose understanding requires knowledge of the perspective or point of view. For example, the meaning of "behind the rock" is likely to depend on the position of the speaker (projective), whereas the meaning of "on the desk" is not (non-projective). Sometimes the interpretation is ambiguous, as in "behind the house," which may mean either at the natural back of the house or on the opposite side of the house from the speaker.Creswell, Max. 1978. "Prepositions and points of view." Linguistics and Philosophy, 2: 1–41.
The following table gives the inflected forms of the preposition o (). The optional pronouns that follow the inflected forms are given in parentheses.
Cymerodd ef hi ohonof – .
For example, the Arabic preposition على () inflects as علَيَّ () , علَيْكَ) () , علَيْهِ () , etc.
In Iberian Romance languages such as Spanish language and Portuguese, the preposition con or com has special forms incorporating certain pronouns (depending on the language). For example, in Spanish and Asturian conmigo means . Historically, this developed from the Latin use of cum after a pronoun, as in mecum .
Bororo language, an indigenous language of Brazil, uses postpositions in all contexts: tori ji . When these modify a pronoun rather than a full noun, the phrase contracts into an inflected postposition (and therefore looks like a pronominal prefix, rather than a suffix as in the examples above: bagai , i-wagai ).
Many English contain particles that are used adverbially, even though they mostly have the form of a preposition (such words may be called prepositional adverbs). Examples are on in carry on, get on, etc., and over in take over, fall over, and so on. The equivalents in Dutch grammar and German grammar are , which also often have the same form as prepositions: for example, Dutch aanbieden and German anbieten (both meaning "to offer") contain the separable prefix aan/an, which is also a preposition meaning "on" or "to".
As noted in previous sections, Chinese can also be said to have postpositions, although these can be analyzed as nominal (noun) elements. For more information, see the article on Chinese grammar, particularly the sections on coverbs and locative phrases.
Adpositions combine syntax with their complement, whereas case markings combine with a noun morphologically. In some instances it may not be clear which applies; the following are some possible means of making such a distinction:
Even so, a clear distinction cannot always be made. For example, the post-nominal elements in Japanese and Korean language are sometimes called case particles and sometimes postpositions. Sometimes they are analyzed as two different groups because they have different characteristics (e.g., the ability to combine with focus particles), but in such analysis, it is unclear which words should fall into which group.
Turkish grammar, Finnish grammar and Hungarian have both extensive case-marking and postpositions, but there is evidence to help distinguish the two:
In these examples, the case markings form a word with their hosts (as shown by vowel harmony, other word-internal effects and agreement of adjectives in Finnish), while the postpositions are independent words. As is seen in the last example, adpositions are often used in conjunction with case affixes – in languages that have a case, a given adposition usually takes a complement in a particular case, and sometimes (as has been seen above) the choice of the case helps specify the meaning of the adposition.
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