Prepositions - přednáška

← Before we talked about major parts of speech (content words) – they are more important – their main function is to express meaning

MINOR PARTS OF SPEECH (function words) – they modify the meaning

Their number varies according to the level of detail of a particular analysis. More important is the clarity with which these classes are distinguished. Moreover, the minor word classes can be easily defined by listing their members (the largest has only about 50 members).

Minor word classes have several properties in common:

• they tend not to alter the basic content of the sentence

Broke: send money. X I am broke; will you, please, send some money.

• members of minor classes occur more frequently than members of major classes (all of the fifty most common words in English are function words; they account for 60% of speech and 45% of writing).

PREPOSITIONS – They describe the relationship between nominal complement and something else. It can link nouns, verbs or adjectives and noun, pronoun

• important to English because they form phrases that play a wide range of grammatical roles. In other languages they may play a less significant role because their jobs are carried out by inflectional endings.

• prepositions also express many of the major semantic relations that unite members of a sentence in a meaningful whole.

• approximately 50 prepositions in E.

• prepositions often enter into complex frozen expressions that resemble idioms

- prepositions express relations between two parts of a sentence

• prepositions always have a nominal complement (it can be a noun or a pronoun), a nominal phrase to which they are related:

by bus, from his expression, without having looked at her, by means of Moodle,

prepositions are usually followed by a noun phrase → The pencil is on the desk. = nominal complement

X preposition stranding

- questions: What did you call about? – It can be substituted – I called about the party. – About what?

- Wh-clauses: She asked what you called about.

- rel. clauses: The painting you are looking at …

- exclamations: What a trouble he put me to!

- passives: Our house was broken into.

- infinitives: I need someone to talk to

Stress:

one syllable prepositions usually unstressed, two and more syllable prep. stressed on one of the syllables

! unlike prepositions, adverb particles are stressed

preposition X adverb particle X adverb

Adverb particle = part of a phrasal verb – Můžeme přehodit – You can look up a new word./You can look a new word up. I cut down the tree./I cut the tree down.

I looked up. – Adverb – There is no nominal complement. We can exchange it for something else – I looked down. – We CAN’T exchange adverb particles.

I went down the hill. – Preposition – We can’t change structure of the sentence.

The meaning and use of prepositions study in Foley 280 – 285 + dependent prepositions: 164 - 167