Preposition
In grammar, a preposition is a word that establishes a relationship between what is called its object (usually a noun phrase), and some other part of the sentence.
Examples (with the preposition highlighted and the prepositional phrase underlined):
- My coat is on the sofa.
- I knitted throughout the day.
- They will not be finished until lunchtime.
- The keys are between the cushions.
- A man hid behind the door.
Prepositional phrases
The preposition and its object make up a prepositional phrase, which can be used to modify noun phrases and verb phrases in the manner of adjectives and adverbs. For example, in the sentence "He has a can of lemonade", the prepositional phrase of lemonade is used to modify the noun can. In the sentence "The girl sat in the chair", the prepositional phrase in the chair modifies the verb sat.
Although the canonical object of a preposition is a noun phrase, there are cases in which another kind of phrase forms a prepositions object. For instance, in the sentence "Come out from under the bed", the object of the preposition from is another prepositional phrase, under the bed. Furthermore, according to some analyses, in the sentence "I opened the door before he walked in", before is not a conjunction but rather a preposition whose object is a full sentence (he walked in).
English prescriptive guidelines
In English usage, prescriptivists often argue that, since prepositions are usually meant to come before the words they modify, one should not end a sentence with a preposition. This guideline stems from the pre-20th century belief that Latin is a perfect language, since it never changes. Latin was the literary language among English speakers in the Middle Ages, and Church Latin remains the language of the Catholic Church to this day. In Latin, prepositions always immediately precede the nouns they modify, thus never appearing at the end of a sentence.
However, the reason why Latin doesn't change is because there are no more native speakers. When Latin was an active language, it changed over time just like any other language. Furthermore, Latin is a heavily inflected language, while Modern English relies primarily on word order to convey grammatical meaning.1 As a result, English has far more prepositions than Latin. Latin does not need as many prepositions because its larger number of cases supplement prepositions in their function of conveying grammatical meaning. These realizations has come relatively recently by descriptive linguistics.
Following the prescriptivist guideline can frequently make a sentence become unnecessarily complicated. For example, compare "The table I'd like to sit at", with "The table at which I'd like to sit". To most English speakers, the former sounds more natural, while the latter sounds stilted and overly formal.
In many other Germanic languages, such as German, the use of prepositions at the end of a sentence is required, because certain verbs have prepositional prefixes. For instance, "arrive" in German is "ankommen" (literally "to-come"). A sentence that uses this verb, however, will put the "an" at the end of the sentence: "Die Frau kommt um 7 Uhr in Köln an." (Literally: "The woman comes at seven o'clock in Cologne to."; Idiomatically: "The woman arrives in Cologne at seven o'clock.") Some grammarians hold that English prepositions at the ends of sentences are related to this Germanic usage, and therefore natural parts of the English language.
Postpositions
Some languages, such as Japanese, place prepositions after the noun and thus have what are called postpositions. In some inflected languages, prepositions are not separate words; their function is instead performed by a system of inflections on nouns called cases or declension.
Notes
- Historically, English was in fact an inflected language, relying on cases instead of word order to convey grammatical information. Thus English had a much smaller number of prepositions in its lexicon. However, as Old English evolved into Middle English into Modern English, inflections were dropped in favor of word order, and many new prepositions were added. See: History of the English language; Declension in English.
See also
