adposition
Sign in to saveAlso known as adpositions, preposition and postposition, ADP
Adpositions are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations (in, under, towards, behind, ago, etc.) or mark various semantic roles (of, for). The most common adpositions are prepositions (which precede their complement) and postpositions (which follow their complement).
Adpositions are words that show relationships between things, such as where something is located (like "in" or "under"), when something happens (like "ago"), or what role something plays in a sentence (like "of" or "for"). They're important because they help clarify these spatial, temporal, and grammatical connections in language, and the most familiar types are prepositions, which come before their object, and postpositions, which come after.
AI-generated from the Wikipedia summary — may contain errors.
Wikidata facts
Show 2 more facts
- equivalent class
- purl.org/linguistics/gold/Adposition
via Wikidata · CC0
~33 min read
Article
22 sectionsContents
- Terminology
- Grammatical properties
- Classification of adpositions
- Stranding
- Simple versus complex
- Marginal prepositions
- Proper ''versus'' improper
- Different forms of complement
- Semantic functions
- Inflected adpositions
- Celtic
- Semitic
- Other languages
- Overlaps with other categories
- Adverbs and particles
- Conjunctions
- Verbs
- Case affixes
- See also
- References
- Bibliography
- External links
Adpositions are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations (in, under, towards, behind, ago, etc.) or mark various semantic roles (of, for). The most common adpositions are prepositions (which precede their complement) and postpositions (which follow their complement).
An adposition typically combines with a noun phrase, this being called its complement, or sometimes object. English generally has prepositions rather than postpositions – words such as in, under and of precede their objects, such as "in England", "under the table", "of Jane" – although there are a few exceptions including ago and notwithstanding, as in "three days ago" and "financial limitations notwithstanding". Some languages that use a different word order have postpositions instead (like Turkic languages) or have both types (like Finnish). The phrase formed by an adposition together with its complement is called an adpositional phrase (or prepositional phrase, postpositional phrase, etc.). Such a phrase can function as a grammatical modifier or complement in a wide range of types of phrases.