preposition

Prepositions are used to express the relationship of a noun or pronoun (or another grammatical element functioning as a noun) to the rest of the sentence. The noun or pronoun that is connected by the preposition is known as the object of the preposition.

Some common prepositions are in, on, for, to, of, with, and about, though there are many others.

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Preposition

a class of syncategorematic words or parts of speech. They are used in many languages, including Indo-European and Semitic, for the expression of various relationships between the dependent and principal members of a word combination. (The dependent member is usually a noun or pronoun.)

The preposition always precedes the dependent member. Functioning only in the role of a syntactic relation marker between the parts of a sentence, prepositions are not themselves members of a sentence. They are classed as primary or derived prepositions.

Primary prepositions are simple in composition and are distinguished by the multiplicity of relations that can be expressed by using them—for example, Russian bez, “without”; nad, “above”; v, “in”; k, “to”; or o, “about.” Derived prepositions are associated in structure and origin with autosemantic words. They may be adverbs (vblizi, “nearby”; navstrechu, “toward”; sboku, “from the side”), denominative prepositions (v oblasti, “in the field of; v tseliakh, “with a view to”), and deverbative prepositions (blagodaria, “(hanks to”; vkliuchaia, “including”).

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References in periodicals archive

In terms of the logical metafunction there is an increase in the number of nominal groups exhibiting each of the three given possibilities: Head + Finite Clause, Head + Nonfinite Clause, and Head + Prepositional Phrase.

The Role of Systemic Functional Grammar in the Expansion of Nominal Groups/El papel de la gramatica sistemica funcional en la expansion de sintagmas nominales

Trivia activities could be adapted to target a wide variety of grammatical structures, including other forms of post-nominal modification (prepositional phrases and participles), question forms, and adverbial clauses.

Promoting EFL students' accuracy and fluency through interactive practice activities

But the apotheosis comes in the third sentence, quoted previously as a paradigmatic example of Graham's use of syntactic inversion and the fronting of prepositions: "From wherever it is I urge these words / To find their subtle vents, the northern dazzle / Of silence cranes to watch." Four of the five stress positions in the fifth line are occupied by the phonemic pattern, which ends on the word that seems to be the keyword of it all--what Michael Riffaterre calls the hypogram--"words." (16) From this perspective, the "distortion of mathematical grammar" in starting the sentence with the attenuated prepositional phrase is hardly arbitrary, or merely ornamental.

W.S. Graham's Syntax

They are principally realized by noun + of fragments (rest of the), and prepositional phrases (in a variety) and passive structures (is divided into).

From the perspective of: Functional Analysis of formulaic sequences in Applied Linguistics Research Articles

Also, as opposed to the prepositional complement in passives, which receives ablative case from the preposition by, the OD a book in DOCs receives inherent case from the verbal trace t i, thus satisfying the case filter (Chomsky 1986, 73-74) as well as the Proper Antecedent Condition (Radford 1990, 192).

"?Que fue primero: el huevo o la gallina?" Las construcciones ditransitivas y pasivas del ingles en la produccion de ninos bilingues simultaneos

The man who built the country has died), adjective type (The money available is not enough), adverb type (The room upstairs is small), and prepositional phrase type (The problem with Nigeria political system).

Structural patterns of postmodifier in Nigerian English noun phrase

Except the two independent prepositional phrases discussed above, other examples that can show the skillful complexity and intricate complication of the long adverbial "When ..." clause are the verbal phrases including the present participle phrase, "Wishing me like to one more rich in hope" in line five, the past participle phrase "Featured like him, like him with friends possessed" in line six, and another present participle phrase "Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope" in line seven.

The poetic forms of Shakespeare's three single-sentenced sonnets

In this sphere, there is the tendency that the prepositional as well as the procedural dimensions of knowledge are often implicit in the different theoretical and practical approaches of aesthetic knowledge and learning.

The epistemic of aesthetic knowledge and knowing: implications for aesthetic education curricula and rational pedagogy in Nigerian secondary schools

From a synchronic point of view, the prepositional clause has become the common expression for possession.

Vom Status pendens zum Satzsubjekt: Studien zur Topikalisierung in neueren semitischen Sprachen

Indeed, Publius favored lengthy, periodic sentences that were verbose and dramatic, full of subordinate clauses and prepositional phrases.

Spacious fields: Alexander Hamilton and the rhetoric of sentence architecture

It is especially useful to recognize prepositional phrases because neither the subject nor the verb of the sentence can be found inside them.

Chapter 20: Reviewing the parts of speech