Phonetics

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Bog'liq
GRAMMAR .LECTURE 14

Semantic features

Semantic features
The preposition is traditionally defined as a word expressing relations between words in the sentence. The weakness of the traditional definition is that it does not allow us to distinguish prepositions from subordinating conjunctions. Cf. She never saw him after the concert. vs. She never saw him after he left town. In traditional analysis, the preposition is used with the noun phrase, not with the verb phrase. Such being the case, after in the first sentence is a preposition, while after in the second sentence is a conjunction.

Functionally, prepositions can be divided into grammatical, and non-grammatical (the latter are subdivided into spatial and non-spatial).
Grammatical prepositions have no identifiable meaning independent of the grammatical construction in which they occur. Consider:
1. He was interviewed by the police.
In this example the preposition have no identifiable meaning of their own: it is only in the co-text that we can say what meaning they express. In (1) by marks the element that is the Agent;

Morphological features
Structurally, prepositions fall into two categories: simple, or one-word, prepositions (in, on, for, to, about, after, etc.) and composite, or two- or three word, prepositions (ahead of, because of, according to; by means of, at the cost of, with reference to, etc.). However, not all scholars recognize the existence of composite prepositions.

Syntactic features
As far as phrases are concerned, the function of prepositions is to connect words with each other. On the sentence level: a preposition is never a part of a sentence by itself; it enters the part of sentence whose main centre is the following noun, or pronoun, or gerund. It won’t be correct to say that prepositions connect parts of a sentence. They do not do that, as they stand within a part of the sentence, not between two parts.

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