A Student's Introduction to English Grammar

.:: Prepositions and preposition phrases

1 The traditional class of prepositions 127
2 Extending the membership of the class 128
3 Further category contrasts 133
4 Grammaticised uses of prepositions 136
5 Preposition stranding 137
6 The structure of PPs 139
7 pp complements in clause structure 142
8 Prepositional idioms and fossilisation 146

1 The traditional class of prepositions

Prepositions make up a much smaller class of lexemes than the open

categories of verb, noun, adjective and adverb. There are only about a hundred

prepositions in current use. Traditional grammars list even fewer than that, but

we don't follow the tradition on this point. Although all words traditionally clas­

sified as prepositions are classified as prepositions in our treatment too, we

recognise a good number of other prepositions, formerly classified as adverbs, or

as 'subordinating conjunctions'. We begin this chapter with an account of the

category of prepositions as traditionally understood, and then explain why we

have chosen to expand it.

We give in [I] a sampling of the words that (in at least some of their uses) belong

to the category of prepositions.

[1] above across after against at befo re behind

below between beyond by down fo r fro m

in into of off on over round

since through to under up with without

These words share the following properties.

(a) They take NPs as complement

In general, words are traditionally analysed as prepositions only if they have

complements with the form of NPs. In the following pairs, for example, tradi­

tional grammar accepts the underlined words in [a] as prepositions, but not those

in [b]:

127