Adposition


Adpositions are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations or mark various semantic roles. The most common adpositions are prepositions and postpositions.
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 a different word order have postpositions instead or have both types. The phrase formed by an adposition together with its complement is called an adpositional phrase. Such a phrase can function as a grammatical modifier or complement in a wide range of types of phrases.
A less common type of adposition is the circumposition, which consists of two parts that appear on each side of 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.

Terminology

The word preposition comes from prefix and . This refers to the situation in Latin and Greek, where such words are placed before their complement, and are hence "pre-positioned".
In some languages, including Sindhi, Hindustani, Turkish, Hungarian, Korean, and Japanese, the same kinds of words typically come after their complement. To indicate this, they are called postpositions. There are also some cases where the function is performed by two parts coming before and after the complement; this is called a circumposition.
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. 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.

Grammatical properties

An adposition typically combines with exactly one complement, most often a noun phrase. In English, this is generally a noun, 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 .
An adposition establishes 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, temporal, or of some other type. The World Atlas of Language Structures treats a word as an adposition if it takes a noun phrase as a complement and indicates 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 the same word.
  • As an adjunct to a noun:
  • * the weather in March
  • * cheese from France with live bacteria
  • As a predicative expression
  • * The key is under the stone.
  • As an adjunct to a verb:
  • * sleep throughout the winter
  • * danced atop the tables for hours
  • * dispense with the formalities
  • As an adjunct to an adjective:
  • * happy for them
  • * sick until recently
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:
  • In the cellar was chosen as the best place to store the wine.
An adposition may determine the grammatical case of its complement. In English, the complements of prepositions take the objective case where available. In Koine Greek, for example, certain prepositions always take their objects in a certain case, while other prepositions may take their object in one of two or more cases, depending on the meaning of the preposition. Some languages have cases that are used exclusively after prepositions, or special forms of pronouns for use after prepositions.
The functions of adpositions overlap with those of case markings, but adpositions are classed as syntactic elements, while case markings are morphological.
Adpositions themselves are usually non-inflecting : they do not have paradigms of the form the same way that verbs, adjectives, and nouns can. There are exceptions, though, such as prepositions that have fused with a pronominal object to form inflected prepositions.
The following properties are characteristic of most adpositional systems:
  • Adpositions are among the most frequently occurring words in languages that have them. For example, one frequency ranking for English word forms begins as follows :
  • The most common adpositions are single, monomorphemic words. According to the ranking cited above, for example, the most common English prepositions are on, in, to, by, for, with, at, of, from, as, all of which are single-syllable words and cannot be broken down into smaller units of meaning.
  • Adpositions form a closed class of lexical items and cannot be productively derived from words of other categories.

    Classification of adpositions

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:
  • German: mit einer Frau
  • French: sur la table
  • Welsh: ar y bwrdd
  • Polish: na stole
  • Russian: у меня
  • Khmer: លើក្តារខៀន
  • Tigrinya: አብ ልዕሊ ጣውላ ; አብ ትሕቲ ጣውላ
In certain grammatical constructions, 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, as in "Whom did you go with?" and "There's only one thing worse than being talked about." There are also some expressions in which a preposition's complement may be omitted, such as "I'm going to the park. Do you want to come with ?", and the French Il fait trop froid, je ne suis pas habillée pour
The bolded words in these examples are generally still considered prepositions because when they form a phrase with a complement they must appear first.
A postposition follows its complement to form a postpositional phrase. Examples include:
  • Latin: mecum
  • Turkish: benimle or benim ile
  • Hungarian: fa alatt
  • Chinese: 桌子上' ''zhuōzi shàng ; this is a nominal form, which usually requires an additional preposition to form an adverbial phrase
  • English: ten kilometers away, ten months ago
Some adpositions can appear either before or after their complement:
  • English: the evidence notwithstanding OR notwithstanding the evidence
  • German: meiner Meinung nach OR nach meiner Meinung
  • German: die Straße entlang OR entlang der Straße
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, or to a word that appears to function as a preposition and postposition simultaneously, as in the Vedic Sanskrit construction ā, meaning "from to ".
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, while postpositional phrases are head-final. There 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 the complement. Circumpositions are very common in Pashto and Kurdish. The following are examples from Northern Kurdish :
  • bi... re
  • di... de
  • di... re
  • ji... re
  • ji... ve
Various constructions in other languages might also be analyzed as circumpositional, for example:
  • English: from now on
  • Dutch: naar het einde toe
  • Chinese: 从'冰箱里 cóng bīngxiāng lǐ
  • French: à un détail près
  • Swedish: för tre timmar sedan
  • German: aus dem Zimmer heraus
  • Tigrinya: ካብ ሕጂ 'ንደሓር
Most such phrases, however, can be analyzed as having a different hierarchical structure. The Chinese example could be analyzed as a prepositional phrase headed by cóng, taking the locative noun phrase bīngxīang lǐ 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 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'', and Russian друг с другом. This is not a case of an adposition appearing inside its complement, as the two nouns do not form a single phrase ; such uses have more of a coordinating character.