Delahunty and Garvey
Not may be contracted (i.e., reduced) and attached to the auxiliary im-
mediately before it: He didn’t arrive on time; He mustn’t have arrived yet.
Mood, modality, aspect, tense, voice, and negation may be combined:
Couldn’t she have been being followed by the FBI?
prepositions.
Prepositions (P) combine with noun phrases to form prepositional phrases
(PPs). They are important to English because PPs play a wide range of gram-
matical roles. In other languages—and in earlier stages of English—preposi-
tions play a less significant role because some of their jobs are carried out
by inflectional affixes. Prepositions also express many of the major semantic
relations that integrate parts of a sentence into a grammatical and meaningful
whole. It is thus important for teachers and students to become familiar with,
not learn by heart, the approximately 50 members of this class.
about above across after against
along amid(st) among around astride
at before behind below beneath
beside(s) between beyond but (= except) by
concerning down during except from
in inside into like of
on onto out outside over
since through throughout till to
toward under underneath until unto
up upon with within without
table 7: single-word prepositions
In spite of the significance of prepositions, standard grammars often as-
sign them rather vague definitions, such as “a word that shows the relation of
a noun or pronoun to some other word in a sentence” or, misleading ones,
such as “a word followed by a noun or a pronoun.” English prepositions are
uninflected words that take NP objects to form prepositional phrases. In func-
tional terms, a preposition in a PP functions as the head of that prepositional
phrase. The preposition signals the grammatical and/or semantic role played
by the PP in its clause.
PPs play a broad range of roles in English phrases and sentences, including
modification of nouns, e.g., in The trunk of the car, the PP of the car consists
of the preposition of and its object the Shrew and modifies the noun trunk.
PPs complement verbs and adjectives, e.g., in give it to her, the PP to her is a