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Both prepositions and verbs license NP objects, but in most cases, the distinction is clear because verbs conjugate, and prepositions do not. There are, however, a number of prepositions derived from participial verb forms (e.g., come or barring), which could be confused with verbs.
The name "right-branching" comes from the English syntax of putting such modifiers to the right of the sentence. For example, the following sentence is right-branching. The dog slept on the doorstep of the house in which it lived. Note that the sentence begins with the subject, followed by a verb, and then the object of the verb. This is then ...
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.
For example, in the sentence, "The neighbor is at the door," at is the preposition indicating location. In "We will be there by noon," by is the preposition indicating time.
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.
The following sentence is completely right-branching: Branching picture 5. Most structures in English are, however, not completely left- or completely right-branching, but rather they combine both. The following trees illustrate what can be seen as a stereotypical combination of left- and right-branching in English: Branching picture 6
[a] The predicate must contain a verb, and the verb requires or permits other elements to complete the predicate, or else precludes them from doing so. These elements are objects (direct, indirect, prepositional), predicatives, and adjuncts: She dances. — Verb-only predicate. Ben reads the book. — Verb-plus-direct-object predicate.
As verbs in Spanish incorporate the subject as a TAM suffix, Spanish is not actually a null-subject language, unlike Mandarin (see above). Such verbs in Spanish also have a valency of 1. Intransitive and transitive verbs are the most common, but the impersonal and objective verbs are somewhat different from the norm. In the objective, the verb ...