English Grammar Questions
Q12: About the English Prepositions
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I. - Belarus (or Russia) "... I have a very, very urgent question: prepositions after certain verbs, adjectives, and nouns--do they have any lexical meaning there? I hope you will answer this question as soon as possible, since I cannot find the answer in any of the numerous grammar books I have, and I need this answer really bad ..." Using prepositions in English is one of the most difficult grammatical topics, despite the fact they appear to be perplexingly simple. The short answer to question 12 is this. According to LSEG, when they are taken alone prepositions have absolutely no meanings. Morphologically, prepositions form local, tiny structures as follows: A. the sentence element that requires the preposition (a verb in most instances) B. the preposition C. a prepositional complement She goes[A] to[B] London[C]. Prepositions are taken together with their complements, excepting "verbs with prepositions" and "verbs with adverbial particles and prepositions". Semantically (and morphologically), prepositions are used to clarify (in meaning) various static or dynamic states their complements (or their determinants) have/exhibit. For details, examples, lists of verbs with prepositions, lists of verbs with adverbial particles and prepositions, and for (few) particular grammatical mechanisms employing prepositions we recommend our book: Logically Structured English Grammar. Many English verbs may be followed by (any or) few prepositions; however, there is a large set of verbs which require they are followed only by particular prepositions: this is the group of verbs with prepositions. Note that a verb with preposition, or a verb with adverb and preposition, becomes a phrasal verb: this means, the component words lose their particular meanings (semantically). In addition, there are many prepositional complements (adjectives, nouns, adverbs) which are accompanied only by particular prepositions, and there are no grammatical rules to control that. In those particular instances [same as in most prepositional complement instances] prepositions help forming the meaning of their complements. Again, the English prepositions have no meanings by themselves. Now, this is just the "short answer"; for the "long one" ... you should read LSEG. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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