§5 Preposition stranding 137What makes 'grammaticised' an appropriate tenn for such prepositions is that where
they are placed in sentences depends not on what they mean but entirely on rules of
the grammar. The underlined prepositions in [20] don't have any identifiable meaning
of their own, and there is no possibility of replacing them by any other preposition.
In other examples, these same prepositions do have meaning, of course. In a sen
tence like I sat ilJ!. the door, the word by expresses a relation of being fairly close to
the door. In a sentence like He went to Paris, the word to indicates the endpoint in
a process of movement. And so on. But in these cases we can replace them with
prepositions of different meaning while keeping everything else the same: we
could say I sat opposite the door, or He went across Paris. But it is not possible to
make changes like this in [20] without changing the grammatical construction.
Only a few prepositions have grammaticised uses, the main ones being the single
syllable words as, at, by,for,from, in, of, on, than, to, and with. These make up only
a small minority of the words belonging to the preposition category, but their gram
maticised uses account for a considerable proportion of the actual occurrences of
prepositions in texts.
The property of occurring in grammaticised uses helps to distinguish the category
as a whole from other categories. We can now give a fairly useful general definition of
'preposition', one that provides a basis for using the same tenn in different languages:
[21] The tenn preposition applies to a relatively small category of words, with
basic meanings predominantly having to do with relations in space and time,
containing among its prototypical members grammaticised words that serve
to mark various grammatical functions. I5 Preposition stranding
In certain non-canonical clause constructions the complement of a
preposition may be fronted so that it precedes the preposition (usually with inter
vening material) instead of occupying the basic complement position after the
preposition. In the following examples the preposition is marked by double under
lining, the complement by single underlining:
[22] i Who did they vote Jm:.?
ii I can 't find the book [which she was referring to].[interrogative]
[relative]The preposition is here said to be stranded, i.e. located before a site from which its
understood complement is missing.
I In some languages, e.g. Japanese, words corresponding to English prepositions occur AFTER their
NP complements. In such languages the category is generally called 'postposition' rather than 'prepo
sition'. The difference in position is not really important, though. Japanese verbs, for example, are
normally at the end of the clause (i.e., transitive verbs follow their objects), but that doesn't cast doubt
on their being verbs. We might therefore want to apply the same general term to both languages. For
this reason our general definition (unlike standard dictionary definitions) makes no reference to posi
tion. The intention is that the definition and the term should be applicable in both kinds of language,
just as with • verb'.