Prepositions

Intuition [Beginner]

A preposition is a small word that shows a relationship between a noun (or pronoun) and another word in the sentence. Prepositions usually tell you where something is, when something happens, or how things are connected. "The book is on the table." "On" shows the relationship between the book and the table -- the book's location.

Common prepositions include: in, on, at, by, with, from, to, of, for, about, between, under, over, through, after, before, during. Most prepositions are short words, but some are longer (between, throughout, underneath).

A prepositional phrase is the preposition plus the noun that follows it. "In the morning," "on the table," "with my friends" are all prepositional phrases. The noun after the preposition is called the object of the preposition.

Visual [Beginner]

Where?            When?           Other relationships
  on the desk       at noon          of the king
  in the box        before lunch     with a knife
  under the bed     after school     for you
  over the door     during class     about history
  between the cars  since Tuesday    from Paris
  through the park  until Friday     to the store

Each phrase = preposition + object of the preposition.

Worked example [Beginner]

Find the prepositions and their objects: "The cat slept under the table during the storm."

• under the table -- "under" is the preposition; "the table" is its object. Tells you where.
• during the storm -- "during" is the preposition; "the storm" is its object. Tells you when.

"The cat slept" is the main sentence. Both prepositional phrases add extra detail: where and when.

Check your understanding [Beginner]

Formal definition [Intermediate+]

A preposition is a word that establishes a relation between its complement (the object noun phrase) and another element in the clause. The preposition and its complement together form a prepositional phrase (PP), which can function as an adjunct, complement, or predicative expression.

Preposition types

Type	Relationship	Examples
Spatial	Location, direction, path	in, on, at, under, over, between, through, into, onto, across
Temporal	Time, duration, sequence	at, in, on, before, after, during, since, until, by
Agency/instrument	Means, accompaniment	by, with, without
Beneficiary/purpose	For whom/what	for, to
Source/origin	Where from	from, out of, off
Topic/theme	About what	about, of, concerning
Possession/composition	Belonging, material	of, with
Manner	How something is done	like, as, by (doing)

Spatial prepositions in detail

Spatial prepositions divide into three classes based on the kind of spatial relation they encode:

• Point: at -- treats the location as a dimensionless point ("at the door")
• Surface: on -- treats the location as a two-dimensional surface ("on the wall")
• Container: in -- treats the location as a three-dimensional enclosure ("in the box")

This tripartite system is not arbitrary. Languages worldwide make similar distinctions, though the boundaries differ. English "in the street" treats the street as a container (bounded by buildings), while American English "on the street" treats it as a surface.

Prepositions vs. other categories

Several words straddle the boundary between preposition and other parts of speech:

• Preposition vs. adverb: "She ran outside" (adverb -- no object) vs. "She waited outside the house" (preposition -- has object). Many English words function as both.
• Preposition vs. subordinating conjunction: "We left before the movie" (preposition -- "the movie" is an NP object) vs. "We left before the movie started" (subordinating conjunction -- "the movie started" is a clause). "Before" is a dual-category word.
• Stranded prepositions: "Who are you talking about?" The preposition is stranded at the end, separated from its object ("who"). Preposition stranding is normal in English but impossible in many languages.

Counter-examples to common slips

• "To" is not always a preposition. "I want to leave" -- "to" is an infinitive marker, not a preposition. Test: does "to" have a noun phrase object? If it has a bare verb, it is an infinitive marker.
• Phrasal verbs are not prepositional phrases. "Give up," "look after," "run into" -- the "preposition" here is a particle that is part of the verb, not a true preposition forming a PP.

Linguistic theory [Master]

Prepositions as functional heads

In X-bar theory and its descendants, prepositions are the heads of prepositional phrases (PP). The internal structure is parallel to other phrases: P is the head, its NP complement is the specifier of the complement, and adjuncts can attach at the PP level. This parallelism is a core insight of phrase structure grammar: NPs, VPs, PPs, and APs all share the same skeletal architecture.

The preposition stranding vs. pied-piping parameter

Languages divide into those that allow preposition stranding ("Who are you talking about?") and those that require pied-piping ("About whom are you talking?"). English allows both (with stranding being more natural in most registers). Romance languages, among many others, allow only pied-piping. This is a well-studied syntactic parameter. The analysis in generative grammar is that stranding involves moving the NP complement out of the PP while leaving the P head in place, which requires a special mechanism (either reanalysis of the V+P unit or a movement operation that extracts NP from within PP). Pied-piping involves moving the entire PP, preserving the P-NP unity.

Spatial semantics and conceptual structure

Jackendoff (1983) proposes that spatial prepositions encode conceptual primitives in a "spatial semantics" module. The key primitives include: GO (path), BE (location), AT, ON, IN (spatial relations), and TO, FROM, VIA (directions). "The dog ran into the house" has the conceptual structure: Event: GO([dog], Path: TO(Place: IN([house]))). This decomposition predicts patterns like the impossibility of "into" with a point location ("into the point") -- the IN component requires a container, and a point is not a container.

Polysemy and the coercion problem

Many prepositions are polysemous across spatial, temporal, and abstract domains. "In the box" (spatial), "in the morning" (temporal), "in love" (state), "in danger" (circumstance). The question is whether these are separate senses or whether there is a single abstract sense that is coerced by context. The Gricean approach treats this as metaphorical extension from spatial to abstract. Cognitive linguistics (Lakoff & Johnson 1980) argues that abstract uses are not metaphor but literal instances of an image-schema (the CONTAINER schema) that applies to both physical and abstract domains.

Connections

Prepositions encode relations, and relations are the fundamental building blocks of formal logic. A spatial preposition like "in" corresponds to a binary relation: $In(x,y)$, read "x is in y." The compositional semantics of prepositional phrases parallels function application in lambda calculus: the preposition denotes a function from individuals to truth values (a predicate), and the NP object provides the argument. The scope behavior of prepositions in ambiguous sentences ("I hit the man with the umbrella" -- instrument or modifier?) parallels the scope ambiguities of quantifiers and operators in predicate logic.

Historical context [Master]

The term "preposition" comes from Latin praepositio ("placed before"), from prae ("before") + positus ("placed"). The name reflects the fact that prepositions in Latin and English typically precede their objects. Postpositions (which follow their objects) serve the same function in languages like Japanese and Turkish.

In Old English, prepositions governed specific cases. "On" could take the dative (location: "on the table") or the accusative (motion toward: "on the table" with directional meaning). As English lost its case system during the Middle English period, prepositions took on heavier duty, marking grammatical relations that were previously handled by case endings. This is why English uses more prepositions than Latin -- prepositions replaced lost inflection.

Several Modern English prepositions are fossilized from Old English: "of" from OE of (away from), "to" from OE to (toward), "from" from OE from (away from, by). Others are borrowings: "during" from Old French durant (present participle of durer, "to last"), "except" from Latin exceptus (past participle of excipere, "to take out").

Bibliography [Master]

• Jackendoff, R. (1983). Semantics and Cognition. MIT Press.
• Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago Press.
• Cuyckens, H. (1991). The Semantics of Spatial Prepositions in Dutch and English. PhD dissertation, University of Antwerp.
• Huddleston, R. & Pullum, G. K. (2002). The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge University Press.
• Zwarts, J. (1997). "Vectors are Relative to Their Heads." In Proceedings of ICLS 3.