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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.
Prepositions typically take noun phrases as complements. [17]: 74–80 For example, the prepositional phrase on the table consists of the head on and the complement the table, and the prepositional phrase in the area consists of the head in and the complement the area.
A preposition is usually used with a noun phrase as its complement. A preposition together with its complement is called a prepositional phrase. [32] Examples are in England, under the table, after six pleasant weeks, between the land and the sea.
The table also includes frequencies from other corpora. As well as usage differences, lemmatisation may differ from corpus to corpus – for example splitting the prepositional use of "to" from the use as a particle.
Prepositions (like Modern English words by, for, and with) sometimes follow the word which they govern (especially pronouns), in which case they are called postpositions. The following is a list of prepositions in the Old English language. Prepositions may govern the accusative, genitive, dative or instrumental cases.
The following table shows the inflected forms of the preposition aig ' at '. These forms are a combination of preposition and pronoun, and are obligatory; that is, the separate preposition plus pronoun *aig mi ' at me ' is ungrammatical. Also no separate pronoun may also be given after these combined forms. (So *agam mi is ungrammatical.)
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: German: mit einer Frau ("with a woman") French: sur la table ("on the table")
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.