Preposition

In grammar, a preposition is a type of adposition, a grammatical particle that establishes a relationship between an object (usually a noun phrase) and some other part of the sentence, often expressing a location in place or time.

Other relational particles

Some languages, such as Japanese, place relational particles after the noun and thus have what are called postpositions.

Related Topics:
Japanese - Postpositions

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In Chinese, certain verbs known as coverbs express many of the relationships usually expressed by prepositions. Because coverbs appear before the noun phrase they modify and essentially function as prepositions, they are often referred to as prepositions, even though they are lexically verbs and can in many cases stand alone as the main verb.

Related Topics:
Chinese - Coverb

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In inflected languages, prepositions need not be separate words; their function can instead be performed by a system of inflections on nouns called case or declension. Many linguists consider prepositions and postpositions, like inflectional particles, to all mark case. Due to this functional similarity, there is a small amount of contention regarding the difference between a case marker and an adposition. Otto Jespersen contends that the difference is purely related to form: agglutinative languages have case markers, while isolating languages have adpositions. In The Philosophy of Language, he states that "here is a fundamental incongruity between the Latin system where the case-distinctions are generally, though not always, expressed in form, and the English system where they are never thus expressed" (178; emphasis original). John Taylor, on the other hand, proposes a definition that restricts case markers to those particles with a nominal profile -- that is, the phrase marked by a case marker can serve as a noun, whereas a phrase marked by an adposition cannot.

Related Topics:
Inflected language - Declension - Case marker - Otto Jespersen - Agglutinative language - Isolating language

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