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English prepositions are words – such as of, in, on, at, from, etc. – that function as the head of a prepositional phrase, and most characteristically license a noun phrase object (e.g., in the water). [1] Semantically, they most typically denote relations in space and time. [2] Morphologically, they are usually simple and do not inflect. [1]
The following are single-word prepositions that take clauses as complements. Prepositions marked with an asterisk in this section can only take non-finite clauses as complements. Note that dictionaries and grammars informed by concepts from traditional grammar may categorize these conjunctive prepositions as subordinating conjunctions.
An adpositional phrase is a syntactic category that includes prepositional phrases, postpositional phrases, and circumpositional phrases. [1] Adpositional phrases contain an adposition (preposition, postposition, or circumposition) as head and usually a complement such as a noun phrase.
Function words might be prepositions, pronouns, auxiliary verbs, conjunctions, grammatical articles or particles, all of which belong to the group of closed-class words. Interjections are sometimes considered function words but they belong to the group of open-class words. Function words might or might not be inflected or might have affixes.
English allows the use of "stranded" prepositions. This can occur in interrogative and relative clauses, where the interrogative or relative pronoun that is the preposition's complement is moved to the start , leaving the preposition in place. This kind of structure is avoided in some kinds of formal English.
If is an English preposition, as seen in If it's sunny tomorrow, (then) we'll have a picnic. As a preposition, if normally takes a clausal complement (e.g., it's sunny tomorrow in if it's sunny tomorrow). That clause is, within the conditional construction, the condition (or protasis) on which the main clause (or apodosis) is contingent.
For example, in English, prepositions govern the objective (or accusative) case, and so do verbs. In German, prepositions can govern the genitive, dative, or accusative, and none of these cases are exclusively associated with prepositions. Sindhi is a language which can be said to have a postpositional case. Nominals in Sindhi can take a ...
In linguistics, an inflected preposition is a type of word that occurs in some languages, that corresponds to the combination of a preposition and a personal pronoun.For instance, the Welsh word iddo (/ɪðɔ/) is an inflected form of the preposition i meaning "to/for him"; it would not be grammatically correct to say * i ef.