Prepositional Phrases

Finally, there is one other structure involving prepositions that causes great difficulty for non-native speakers of English. Let us look closely at sentences that exemplify this in order to see the source of the difficulty.

Activity 11.5: Prepositions and Phrasal Verbs

Click on the propositional phrase to change the color to blue. If you select incorrectly, click again to change a wrong word back to black. When the prepositional phrase is correctly selected, write what information is added to the sentence in the text box.

When the prepositional phrase is correctly selected, a yellow solution button will appear. Mouse-over the yellow solution button to check your answer.   

Answers and explanations

These sentences highlight for us the difficulties inherent in distinguishing adverbs from prepositions and prepositions from phrasal verb particles.  The following points may help to clarify the differences and where the meaning differences lie.

First, prepositions must take a noun phrase complement.  That is, a preposition needs to be completed by a noun phrase that acts as its object.  Prepositional phrases function as adjectives (modifying nouns) and adverbs (modifying verbs, adjectives and other adverbs).  Anything that seems to be a preposition but does not have an NP complement is an adverb, not a preposition, and it won’t modify an adjective.

There are several perspectives to take on the distinction between adverbs, prepositions, and objects of prepositions.  The traditional perspective is the one that has been described in the body of the text here: a preposition must have a noun phrase as its object.  Anything that looks like a preposition but lacks an object must be called an adverb.  Yet how do we account for the following: 1) I will visit you on Tuesday, and I will visit you Tuesday 2) John is at home, and John is home 3) I want to come with you, and I want to come with 4) Let’s climb up this mountain, and Let’s climb up Has the word Tuesday really suddenly become an adverb instead of a noun?  Why is it still capitalized as a proper noun then?  Does the word home suddenly change from a noun to an adverb in the second example?  Doesn’t it still refer to a place, and isn’t a word for a place a noun?  And does a preposition without its object suddenly become an adverb? Perhaps there aren’t really so many adverbs as we have been led to believe.  Perhaps so many things that we are told are adverbs are really reduced prepositional phrases, and the real question to ask is why do we sometimes delete the preposition and sometimes delete the object?  And perhaps the answer lies in the same explanation we have seen in several previous cases: in order to speak efficiently, we drop out whatever our listeners can decode from the context. M. LeTourneau (2001) discusses the possibility of intransitive prepositions, prepositions that don’t take an object, just as some verbs don’t take an object.  And since some verbs in English are optionally transitive (may or may not take an object depending upon meaning & use), so, too, may prepositions be optionally transitive, at times taking and at other times not taking an object.

Anything that seems to be a preposition but alters the meaning of a verb from its central meaning is a particle that belongs to the verb compound, and is not a preposition or an adverb.  That is, we should think of the verb as a compound word, not as a verb followed by a preposition.  Examples include turn on the TV and look up a word.  These phrasal verbs present further difficulties than just confusion between adverbs, verbs, and prepositional phrases since some of them employ DO-particle inversion when the DO is a pronoun.

Preposition 6