(^136) Chapter 7 Prepositions and preposition phrases
adjectives have to be related to a predicand, and verbs in predicator function have to
be related to a subject, either overt or understood.
In [ib]fo llowing is predicator in a gerund-participial clause functioning as adjunct;
this clause itself has no overt subject, but an understood subject is retrievable from
the subject of the main clause: the sentence implies that WE were following the
manual.
Owing in [iib] is interpreted in a similar way: we understand that it is farmers
who owe so much to the bank. (See Ch. 13, §2.2, for further discussion of this
construction. )
Example [iiib] is a passive clause, and Liz is the subject - compare the active
version They gave Liz only three months to live.
But in the [a] examples, there is no such predicational relationship to a subject. The
underlined words derive historically from verbs, but they have developed meanings
distinct from the verbal ones, and in this use these words belong to the preposition
category. Fo llowing means "after"; owing to X means "because of X"; and given X
means roughly "if we take X into account".
4 Grammaticised uses of prepositions
An important property that applies to about a dozen of the most frequent
prepositions is that they have what we call grammaticised uses, as illustrated in
these examples:
[20] The article was written in'. a first-year student.
11 [The sudden death gfthe president] stunned the nation.
III I [transferred several hundred dollars to them].
iv [Their request /QL assistance] was ignored.
v They all seem [quite keen on the idea].
The role of the underlined prepositions here is not to express spatial relations as
prepositions often do, but just to mark certain grammatical functions.
Example [i] is a passive clause, and by marks the NP (a first-year student) that
corresponds to the subject of the corresponding active (A first-year student wrote
the article).
The bracketed sequence in [ii] is an NP within which of marks the NP (the pres
ident) that corresponds to the subject of the corresponding clause (The president
suddenly died) or the genitive subject-determiner in an equivalent NP (the
president's sudden death).
To ,for, and on in the PPs in [iii-v] mark the complements of a verb (transfer), a
noun (request), and an adjective (keen), respectively. These words license a PP
complement containing a particular preposition: we say that the preposition is
specified by the head (double-underlined) of the bracketed construction.
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