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69-506: An adposition typically combines with a noun phrase , this being called its complement , or sometimes object . English generally has prepositions rather than postpositions – words such as in, under and of precede their objects, such as in England , under the table , of Jane – although there are a few exceptions including ago and notwithstanding , as in "three days ago" and "financial limitations notwithstanding". Some languages that use

138-414: A grammatical relationship that links its complement to another word or phrase in the context. It also generally establishes a semantic relationship, which may be spatial ( in , on , under , ...), temporal ( after , during , ...), or of some other type ( of , for , via , ...). The World Atlas of Language Structures treats a word as an adposition if it takes a noun phrase as a complement and indicates

207-432: A predicative nominative or predicate nominative ), that serve to assign a property to a subject or an object: This terminology is used in grammar books: However, this use of terminology is avoided by many modern theories of syntax, which typically view the expressions in bold as part of the clause predicate , which means they are not complements of the subject or object but rather are properties that are predicated of

276-518: A prefix to a verb . As noted above, adpositions typically have noun phrases as complements. This can include nominal clauses and certain types of non-finite verb phrase: The word to when it precedes the infinitive in English is not a preposition, but rather is a grammatical particle outside of any main word class . In other cases, the complement may have the form of an adjective or adjective phrase , or an adverbial. This may be regarded as

345-535: A certain case (e.g., ἐν always takes its object in the dative), while other prepositions may take their object in one of two or more cases, depending on the meaning of the preposition (e.g., διά takes its object in the genitive or the accusative, depending on the meaning). Some languages have cases that are used exclusively after prepositions ( prepositional case ), or special forms of pronouns for use after prepositions ( prepositional pronoun ). The functions of adpositions overlap with those of case markings (for example,

414-514: A complement representing a different syntactic category , or simply as an atypical form of noun phrase (see nominalization ). In the last example, the complement of the preposition from is in fact another prepositional phrase. The resulting sequence of two prepositions ( from under ) may be regarded as a complex preposition; in some languages, such a sequence may be represented by a single word, as Russian из-под iz-pod ("from under"). Some adpositions appear to combine with two complements: It

483-417: A constituent the shorter NP his constituents . In some theories of grammar, noun phrases with determiners are analyzed as having the determiner as the head of the phrase, see for instance Chomsky (1995) and Hudson (1990) . Some examples of noun phrases are underlined in the sentences below. The head noun appears in bold. Noun phrases can be identified by the possibility of pronoun substitution, as

552-445: A different word order have postpositions instead (like Turkic languages ) or have both types (like Finnish ). The phrase formed by an adposition together with its complement is called an adpositional phrase (or prepositional phrase, postpositional phrase, etc.). Such a phrase can function as an adjective or as an adverb. A less common type of adposition is the circumposition , which consists of two parts that appear on each side of

621-417: A group of words that act as one unit. Examples of complex prepositions in English include in spite of , with respect to , except for , by dint of , and next to . The distinction between simple and complex adpositions is not clear-cut. Many complex adpositions are derived from simple forms (e.g., with + in → within , by + side → beside ) through grammaticalisation . This change takes time, and during

690-458: A hierarchy of functional projections. Dependency grammars , in contrast, since the basic architecture of dependency places a major limitation on the amount of structure that the theory can assume, produce simple, relatively flat structures for noun phrases. The representation also depends on whether the noun or the determiner is taken to be the head of the phrase (see the discussion of the DP hypothesis in

759-400: A more complex phrase. For simplicity, only dependency-based trees are given. The first tree is based on the traditional assumption that nouns, rather than determiners, are the heads of phrases. The head noun picture has the four dependents the , old , of Fred , and that I found in the drawer . The tree shows how the lighter dependents appear as pre-dependents (preceding their head) and

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828-421: A noun (the head of the phrase) together with zero or more dependents of various types. (These dependents, since they modify a noun, are called adnominal .) The chief types of these dependents are: The allowability, form and position of these elements depend on the syntax of the language in question. In English, determiners, adjectives (and some adjective phrases) and noun modifiers precede the head noun, whereas

897-404: A noun phrase can also function as an adjunct of the main clause predicate, thus taking on an adverbial function, e.g. In some languages, including English, noun phrases are required to be "completed" with a determiner in many contexts, and thus a distinction is made in syntactic analysis between phrases that have received their required determiner (such as the big house ), and those in which

966-452: A noun, but by the determiner (which may be null), and they are thus called determiner phrases (DP) instead of noun phrases. (In some accounts that take this approach, the constituent lacking the determiner – that called N-bar above – may be referred to as a noun phrase.) This analysis of noun phrases is widely referred to as the DP hypothesis . It has been the preferred analysis of noun phrases in

1035-416: A noun, e.g., a gerund ), together with its specifier and modifiers such as articles , adjectives , etc. The complement is sometimes called the object of the adposition. The resulting phrase , formed by the adposition together with its complement, is called an adpositional phrase or prepositional phrase (PP) (or for specificity, a postpositional or circumpositional phrase). An adposition establishes

1104-446: A particular direction ("Kay went to the store"), the direction in which something leads or points ("A path into the woods"), or the extent of something ("The fog stretched from London to Paris"). A static meaning indicates only a location (" at the store", " behind the chair", " on the moon"). Some prepositions can have both uses: "he sat in the water" (static); "he jumped in the water" (probably directional). In some languages,

1173-408: A postpositional phrase. Examples include: Some adpositions can appear either before or after their complement: An adposition like the above, which can be either a preposition or a postposition, can be called an ambiposition . However, ambiposition may also be used to refer to a circumposition (see below), or to a word that appears to function as a preposition and postposition simultaneously, as in

1242-466: A preposition (Latin: praepositio ) stand before the word it governs (go the fools among (Sh[akespeare]); What are you laughing at ?). You might just as well believe that all blackguards are black or that turkeys come from Turkey; many names have either been chosen unfortunately at first or have changed their meanings in the course of time." Simple adpositions consist of a single word ( on , in , for , towards , etc.). Complex adpositions consist of

1311-409: A prepositional phrase headed by cóng ("from"), taking the locative noun phrase bīngxīang lǐ ("refrigerator inside") as its complement. An inposition is a rare type of adposition that appears between parts of a complex complement. For example, in the native Californian Timbisha language , the phrase "from a mean cold" can be translated using the word order "cold from mean"—the inposition follows

1380-560: A pronominal object to form inflected prepositions . The following properties are characteristic of most adpositional systems: As noted above, adpositions are referred to by various terms, depending on their position relative to the complement. 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: In certain grammatical constructions,

1449-498: A single word (such as a noun or pronoun) would not be referred to as a phrase. However, many modern schools of syntax – especially those that have been influenced by X-bar theory – make no such restriction. Here many single words are judged to be phrases based on a desire for theory-internal consistency. A phrase is deemed to be a word or a combination of words that appears in a set syntactic position, for instance in subject position or object position. On this understanding of phrases,

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1518-454: Is a phrase that usually has a noun or pronoun as its head , and has the same grammatical functions as a noun. Noun phrases are very common cross-linguistically , and they may be the most frequently occurring phrase type. Noun phrases often function as verb subjects and objects , as predicative expressions , and as complements of prepositions . One NP can be embedded inside another NP; for instance, some of his constituents has as

1587-532: Is a tendency for languages that feature postpositions also to have other head-final features, such as verbs that follow their objects ; and for languages that feature prepositions to have other head-initial features, such as verbs that precede their objects . This is only a tendency, however; an example of a language that behaves differently is Latin , which employs mostly prepositions, even though it typically places verbs after their objects. A circumposition consists of two or more parts, positioned on both sides of

1656-526: Is also found in some Niger–Congo languages such as Vata and Gbadi, and in some North American varieties of French . Some prescriptive English grammars teach that prepositions cannot end a sentence, although there is no rule prohibiting that use. Similar rules arose during the rise of classicism, when they were applied to English in imitation of classical languages such as Latin. Otto Jespersen , in his Essentials of English Grammar (first published 1933), commented on this definition-derived rule: "...nor need

1725-518: Is called improper if it is some other part of speech being used in the same way as a preposition. Examples of simple and complex prepositions that have been so classified include prima di ("before") and davanti (a) ("in front of") in Italian , and ergo ("on account of") and causa ("for the sake of") in Latin . In reference to Ancient Greek , however, an improper preposition is one that cannot also serve as

1794-454: Is going into her bedroom", but not *"Jay is lying down into her bedroom"). Directional meanings can be further divided into telic and atelic . Telic prepositional phrases imply movement all the way to the endpoint ("she ran to the fence"), while atelic ones do not ("she ran towards the fence"). Static meanings can be divided into projective and non-projective , where projective meanings are those whose understanding requires knowledge of

1863-450: Is illustrated in the examples below. A string of words that can be replaced by a single pronoun without rendering the sentence grammatically unacceptable is a noun phrase. As to whether the string must contain at least two words, see the following section. Traditionally, a phrase is understood to contain two or more words . The traditional progression in the size of syntactic units is word < phrase < clause , and in this approach

1932-414: Is more commonly assumed, however, that Sammy and the following predicate forms a small clause , which then becomes the single complement of the preposition. (In the first example, a word such as as may be considered to have been elided , which, if present, would clarify the grammatical relationship.) Adpositions can be used to express a wide range of semantic relations between their complement and

2001-401: Is more important than generosity . This same conception can be found in subsequent grammars, such as 1878's A Tamil Grammar or 1882's Murby's English grammar and analysis , where the conception of an X phrase is a phrase that can stand in for X. By 1912, the concept of a noun phrase as being based around a noun can be found, for example, "an adverbial noun phrases is a group of words of which

2070-446: Is necessary to complete the meaning of a given expression. Complements are often also arguments (expressions that help complete the meaning of a predicate ). In many non-theoretical grammars, the terms subject complement (also called a predicative of the subject ) and object complement are employed to denote the predicative expressions ( predicative complements ), such as predicative adjectives and nominals (also called

2139-417: Is that the subject is usually not a complement of the predicate: While it is less common to do so, one sometimes extends this reasoning to subject arguments: In those examples, the subject and object arguments are taken to be complements. In this area, the terms complement and argument thus overlap in meaning and use. Note that this practice takes a subject complement to be something very different from

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2208-541: Is tied to the predicate concept in a way that the complement concept is not. In linguistics, an adjunct is an optional, or structurally-dispensable, part of a sentence, clause, or phrase that, when it is removed, will not affect the remainder of the sentence except to discard from it some auxiliary information. A more detailed definition of the adjunct emphasizes its attribute as a modifying form, word, or phrase that depends on another form, word, or phrase, being an element of clause structure with adverbial function. An adjunct

2277-546: The Vedic Sanskrit construction (noun-1) ā (noun-2), meaning "from (noun-1) to (noun-2)". Whether a language has primarily prepositions or postpositions is seen as an aspect of its typological classification, and tends to correlate with other properties related to head directionality . Since an adposition is regarded as the head of its phrase, prepositional phrases are head-initial (or right- branching ), while postpositional phrases are head-final (or left-branching). There

2346-535: The case of the complement varies depending on the meaning, as with several prepositions in German , such as in : In English and many other languages, prepositional phrases with static meaning are commonly used as predicative expressions after a copula ("Bob is at the store"); this may happen with some directional prepositions as well ("Bob is from Australia"), but this is less common. Directional prepositional phrases combine mostly with verbs that indicate movement ("Jay

2415-469: The minimalist program from its start (since the early 1990s), though the arguments in its favor tend to be theory-internal. By taking the determiner, a function word, to be head over the noun, a structure is established that is analogous to the structure of the finite clause , with a complementizer . Apart from the minimalist program, however, the DP hypothesis is rejected by most other modern theories of syntax and grammar, in part because these theories lack

2484-505: The Indo-European languages this phenomenon is mostly confined to the Celtic languages like Welsh and Irish . Polish also allows some degree of combining prepositions with pronouns in the third person. The majority of Welsh prepositions can be inflected. This is achieved by having a preposition such as o ( ' of/from ' ) + a linking element; in the case of o this is -hon- +

2553-473: The Latin prefix ad- , meaning "to"). However, some linguists prefer to use the well-known and longer-established term preposition in place of adposition , irrespective of position relative to the complement. An adposition typically combines with exactly one complement , most often a noun phrase (or, in a different analysis, a determiner phrase ). In English, this is generally a noun (or something functioning as

2622-454: The assimilated pronoun element, resulting in ohon- being the preposition's "stem" form. It is common in speech for the pronoun to be present after the preposition, but it can be omitted. Unless used with a pronoun the form is always o and not the "stem", e.g. dw i'n dod o Gymru – ' I come from Wales ' , gormod o gwrw – ' too much ( of ) beer ' . Noun phrase A noun phrase – or NP or nominal (phrase) –

2691-532: The choice of adposition may be determined by another element in the construction or be fixed by the construction as a whole. Here the adposition may have little independent semantic content of its own, and there may be no clear reason why the particular adposition is used rather than another. Examples of such expressions are: Prepositions sometimes mark roles that may be considered largely grammatical: Spatial meanings of adpositions may be either directional or static . A directional meaning usually involves motion in

2760-407: The complement of a preposition may be absent or may be moved from its position directly following the preposition. This may be referred to as preposition stranding (see also below ), as in "Whom did you go with ?" and "There's only one thing worse than being talked about ." There are also some (mainly colloquial) expressions in which a preposition's complement may be omitted, such as "I'm going to

2829-480: The complement. Circumpositions are very common in Pashto and Kurdish . The following are examples from Northern Kurdish (Kurmanji): Various constructions in other languages might also be analyzed as circumpositional, for example: Most such phrases, however, can be analyzed as having a different hierarchical structure (such as a prepositional phrase modifying a following adverb). The Chinese example could be analyzed as

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2898-767: The complement. Other terms sometimes used for particular types of adposition include ambiposition , inposition and interposition . Some linguists use the word preposition in place of adposition regardless of the applicable word order. The word preposition comes from Latin : prae- prefix (pre- prefix) ("before") and Latin : ponere ("to put"). This refers to the situation in Latin and Greek (and in English ), where such words are placed before their complement (except sometimes in Ancient Greek), and are hence "pre-positioned". In some languages, including Sindhi , Hindustani , Turkish , Hungarian , Korean , and Japanese ,

2967-403: The determiner is lacking (such as big house ). The situation is complicated by the fact that in some contexts a noun phrase may nonetheless be used without a determiner (as in I like big houses ); in this case the phrase may be described as having a "null determiner". (Situations in which this is possible depend on the rules of the language in question; for English, see English articles .) In

3036-470: The determiner. An early conception of the noun phrase can be found in First work in English by Alexander Murison . In this conception a noun phrase is "the infinitive of the verb" (p. 146), which may appear "in any position in the sentence where a noun may appear". For example, to be just is more important than to be generous has two underlined infinitives which may be replaced by nouns, as in justice

3105-414: The disadvantage of"), zulasten/zu Lasten ("at the expense of"). The distinction between complex adpositions and free combinations of words is not a black-and-white issue: complex adpositions (in English, "prepositional idioms") can be more fossilized or less fossilized. In English, this applies to a number of structures of the form "preposition + (article) + noun + preposition", such as in front of , for

3174-424: The grammatical or semantic relationship of that phrase to the verb in the containing clause. 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

3243-605: The head is a pronoun rather than a noun, or when elements are linked with a coordinating conjunction such as and , or , but . For more information about the structure of noun phrases in English, see English grammar § Phrases . Noun phrases typically bear argument functions. That is, the syntactic functions that they fulfill are those of the arguments of the main clause predicate , particularly those of subject , object and predicative expression . They also function as arguments in such constructs as participial phrases and prepositional phrases . For example: Sometimes

3312-400: The heavier ones as post-dependents (following their head). The second tree assumes the DP hypothesis, namely that determiners serve as phrase heads, rather than nouns. The determiner the is now depicted as the head of the entire phrase, thus making the phrase a determiner phrase. There is still a noun phrase present ( old picture of Fred that I found in the drawer ) but this phrase is below

3381-490: The heavier units – phrases and clauses – generally follow it. This is part of a strong tendency in English to place heavier constituents to the right, making English more of a head-initial language. Head-final languages (e.g. Japanese and Turkish ) are more likely to place all modifiers before the head noun. Other languages, such as French , often place even single-word adjectives after the noun. Noun phrases can take different forms than that described above, for example when

3450-467: The meaning of the English preposition of is expressed in many languages by a genitive case ending), but adpositions are classed as syntactic elements, while case markings are morphological . Adpositions themselves are usually non-inflecting ("invariant"): they do not have paradigms of the form (such as tense, case, gender, etc.) the same way that verbs, adjectives, and nouns can. There are exceptions, though, such as prepositions that have fused with

3519-444: The noun but precedes any following modifiers that form part of the same noun phrase . The Latin word cum is also commonly used as an inposition, as in the phrase summa cum laude , meaning "with highest praise", lit. "highest with praise". The term interposition has been used for adpositions in structures such as word for word , French coup sur coup ("one after another, repeatedly"), and Russian друг с другом ("one with

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3588-435: The noun is the base word, that tells the time or place of an action, or how long, how far, or how much". By 1924, the idea of a noun phrase being a noun plus dependents seems to be established. For example, "Note order of words in noun-phrase--noun + adj. + genitive" suggests a more modern conception of noun phrases. See also: Complement (grammar) In grammar , a complement is a word , phrase , or clause that

3657-409: The nouns and pronouns in bold in the following sentences are noun phrases (as well as nouns or pronouns): The words in bold are called phrases since they appear in the syntactic positions where multiple-word phrases (i.e. traditional phrases) can appear. This practice takes the constellation to be primitive rather than the words themselves. The word he , for instance, functions as a pronoun, but within

3726-541: The original X-bar theory , the two respective types of entity are called noun phrase (NP) and N-bar ( N , N ′ ). Thus in the sentence Here is the big house , both house and big house are N-bars, while the big house is a noun phrase. In the sentence I like big houses , both houses and big houses are N-bars, but big houses also functions as a noun phrase (in this case without an explicit determiner). In some modern theories of syntax, however, what are called "noun phrases" above are no longer considered to be headed by

3795-422: The other"). This is not a case of an adposition appearing inside its complement, as the two nouns do not form a single phrase (there is no phrase * word word , for example); such uses have more of a coordinating character. Preposition stranding is a syntactic construct in which a preposition occurs somewhere other than immediately before its complement. For example, in the English sentence "What did you sit on?"

3864-458: The park. Do you want to come with [me]?", and the French Il fait trop froid, je ne suis pas habillée pour ("It's too cold, I'm not dressed for [the situation].") The bolded words in these examples are generally still considered prepositions because when they form a phrase with a complement (in more ordinary constructions) they must appear first. A postposition follows its complement to form

3933-577: The perspective or point of view. For example, the meaning of "behind the rock" is likely to depend on the position of the speaker (projective), whereas the meaning of "on the desk" is not (non-projective). Sometimes the interpretation is ambiguous, as in "behind the house," which may mean either at the natural back of the house or on the opposite side of the house from the speaker. Some languages feature inflected adpositions—adpositions (usually prepositions) marked for grammatical person and/or grammatical number to give meanings such as "on me," "from you," etc. In

4002-429: The preposition on has what as its complement, but what is moved to the start of the sentence, because it is an interrogative word . This sentence is much more common and natural than the equivalent sentence without stranding: "On what did you sit?" Preposition stranding is commonly found in English , as well as North Germanic languages such as Swedish . Its existence in German is debated. Preposition stranding

4071-415: The previous section). Below are some possible trees for the two noun phrases the big house and big houses (as in the sentences Here is the big house and I like big houses ). 1. Phrase-structure trees, first using the original X-bar theory, then using the current DP approach: 2. Dependency trees, first using the traditional NP approach, then using the DP approach: The following trees represent

4140-511: The relevant functional categories. Dependency grammars, for instance, almost all assume the traditional NP analysis of noun phrases. For illustrations of different analyses of noun phrases depending on whether the DP hypothesis is rejected or accepted, see the next section. The representation of noun phrases using parse trees depends on the basic approach to syntactic structure adopted. The layered trees of many phrase structure grammars grant noun phrases an intricate structure that acknowledges

4209-464: The rest of the context. The relations expressed may be spatial (denoting location or direction), temporal (denoting position in time), or relations expressing comparison, content, agent, instrument, means, manner, cause, purpose, reference, etc. Most common adpositions are highly polysemous (they have various different meanings). In many cases, a primary, spatial meaning becomes extended to non-spatial uses by metaphorical or other processes. Because of

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4278-745: The sake of . The following characteristics are good indications that a given combination is "frozen" enough to be considered a complex preposition in English: Marginal prepositions are prepositions that have affinities with other word classes, most notably participles. Marginal prepositions behave like prepositions but derive from other parts of speech. Some marginal prepositions in English include barring , concerning , considering , excluding , failing , following , including , notwithstanding , regarding , and respecting . In descriptions of some languages, prepositions are divided into proper (or essential ) and improper (or accidental ). A preposition

4347-578: The same kinds of words typically come after their complement. To indicate this, they are called postpositions (using the prefix post- , from Latin post meaning "behind, after"). There are also some cases where the function is performed by two parts coming before and after the complement; this is called a circumposition (from Latin circum- prefix "around"). In some languages, for example Finnish , some adpositions can be used as both prepositions and postpositions. Prepositions, postpositions and circumpositions are collectively known as adpositions (using

4416-517: The same word. In the last of these examples the complement has the form of an adverb, which has been nominalised to serve as a noun phrase; see Different forms of complement , below. Prepositional phrases themselves are sometimes nominalized: An adposition may determine the grammatical case of its complement. In English, the complements of prepositions take the objective case where available ( from him , not * from he ). In Koine Greek , for example, certain prepositions always take their objects in

4485-529: The sentence it also functions as a noun phrase. The phrase structure grammars of the Chomskyan tradition ( government and binding theory and the minimalist program ) are primary examples of theories that apply this understanding of phrases. Other grammars such as dependency grammars are likely to reject this approach to phrases, since they take the words themselves to be primitive. For them, phrases must contain two or more words. A typical noun phrase consists of

4554-407: The subject complements of traditional grammar, which are predicative expressions, as just mentioned above. Construed in the broadest sense, any time a given expression is somehow necessary in order to render another expression "complete", it can be characterized as a complement of that expression: Construed in the broad sense, many complements cannot be understood as arguments. The argument concept

4623-577: The subject or object. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language assigns the term "predicative complement" to both uses and shifts the terminological distinction to the verb: In many modern grammars (for instance in those that build on the X-bar framework ), the object argument of a verbal predicate is called a complement. In fact, this use of the term is the one that currently dominates in linguistics. A main aspect of this understanding of complements

4692-452: The transitional stages, the adposition acts in some ways like a single word, and in other ways like a multi-word unit. For example, current German orthographic conventions recognize the indeterminate status of certain prepositions, allowing two spellings: anstelle / an Stelle ("instead of"), aufgrund / auf Grund ("because of"), mithilfe / mit Hilfe ("by means of"), zugunsten / zu Gunsten ("in favor of"), zuungunsten / zu Ungunsten ("to

4761-416: The variety of meanings, a single adposition often has many possible equivalents in another language, depending on the exact context. This can cause difficulties in foreign language learning . Usage can also vary between dialects of the same language (for example, American English has on the weekend , whereas British English uses at the weekend ). In some contexts (as in the case of some phrasal verbs )

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