Prepositions
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Wikipedia-Article "Prepositions"
An adposition is a term in grammar used for a wide variety of particles and affixes which are attached to a noun phrase to modify it or to show its relation to another concept or situation in the same clause. Phrases with an adposition as head are called adpositional phrases. There are two types of adpositions which have separate terms depending on how they are positioned relative to the noun phrase: prepositions (before the noun phrase) and postpositions (after the noun phrase). Adpositions are very often used to form adverbials, particularly in Germanic languages, like 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"
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Prepositions
The preposition and its object make up a prepositional phrase, which can be used to modify noun phrases and verb phrases in the manner of adjectives and adverbs. For example, in the sentence "He has a can of lemonade", the prepositional phrase of lemonade is used to modify the noun can. In the sentence "The girl sat in the chair", the prepositional phrase in the chair modifies the verb sat.
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 sentence (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.
Postpositions
English has three common postpositions: "ago", "away", and "hence"; however, English also has a tendency to form postpositional compound words, such as "thereafter" and "wherein", a quality likely borrowed from Latin, a fellow prepositional language. 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 postposition due to the wh-movement phenomenon that occurs in English, in which the preposition is actually modifying a trace that is left behind when the interrogative pronoun (the wh-word) is moved to the front of an interrogative sentence.
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 itself is typically SOV). The use of postpositions also correlates with the tendency to place adjectives before the noun they modify.
Postpositions are the norm in East Asian languages, even unrelated ones such as Japanese, Korean and Chinese.
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 "[T]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" (178; emphasis original). 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.