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A prepositional adverb is a word – mainly a particle – which is very similar in its form to a preposition but functions as an adverb. Prepositional adverbs occur, for example, in English, German and Dutch. Unlike real prepositions, they occur mainly at the end of a phrase and not before nouns. They also modify the verb, which a preposition ...
For example, owing to and out of are listed as prepositions, but according to, because of, and instead of are treated as adverb + preposition. Modern descriptive grammars have tended to extend the category of complex prepositions, and there is accordingly some variation in dictionary practice, depending on how far they are influenced by such work.
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.
The remaining part of the phrase is called the prepositional complement, or sometimes the "object" of the preposition. In English and many other Indo-European languages it takes the form of a noun phrase, such as a noun, pronoun, or gerund, possibly with one or more modifiers. A prepositional phrase can function as an adjective or adverb.
The following are single-word intransitive prepositions. This portion of the list includes only prepositions that are always intransitive; prepositions that can occur with or without noun phrase complements (that is, transitively or intransitively) are listed with the prototypical prepositions.
For example, a verb phrase consists of a verb together with any objects and other dependents; a prepositional phrase consists of a preposition and its complement (and is therefore usually a type of adverbial phrase); and a determiner phrase is a type of noun phrase containing a determiner.
The following is a partial list of linguistic example sentences illustrating various linguistic phenomena. ... [prepositional phrase] fronting instead of stranding; ...
An English preposition can never follow its noun, so if we can change verb - P - noun to verb - noun - P, then P cannot be a preposition and must be particle. [h] But even with a particle verb, shifting the particle is not always possible, for example if it is followed by a pronoun instead of a noun, or if there is a fixed collocation. A second ...