Overview

Prepositions are often thought of as grammatical particles which introduce NPs, indicating an indirect object or modifier relation, rather than as fully fledged lexical items on a par with nouns, verbs or adjectives. This issue is addressed in 8.2, with an investigation of the syntactic functions and structural properties of prepositions in comparison with other lexical categories and items of a more grammatical nature. In 8.3, we shall pursue the idea that prepositions (like verbs, adjectives and nouns) can take complements other than NPs, or no complement at all, thus subsuming many items traditionally classified as ‘subordinating conjunctions’ or adverbs within the category of prepositions. Here, as elsewhere, the important question is not whether one term is more appropriate than another – the issue is raised principally as a way of looking at similarities and differences which cut across the traditional classification of the parts of speech. In 8.4, the syntactic properties of so called ‘complex prepositions’ are discussed.

One area of meaning in which prepositions play an important role is the expression of spatial relations. In 8.5, there is an investigation of some significant differences between French and English concerning the ways in which prepositions can combine with verbs of movement to indicate the place to or from which an entity moves.

There are many difficulties surrounding the use of particular prepositions. In 8.6, this chapter is concluded by a look at a few cases (principally involving en and avec) which are amenable to systematic analysis.