Talk:Adposition/Archive preposition

Search of vs. search for

Hi, I need to know why the sentence "I'm in search of the truth" and "I'm searching for the truth" are apparently correct with regard to the prepositions 'of' and 'for' whereas you apparently cannot say "I'm in search for the truth" and "I'm searching of the truth." Both 'of' and 'for' are the prepositions that cause my problem. --Mubstar 01:48, 30 May 2005 (UTC)

In search of is a fixed expression, a holdover from back when the noun search regularly used the preposition of. Ruakh 17:11, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Churchill on those who oppose ending sentences with prepositions

I (mis?)remembered Winston Churchill saying "There are some things up with which we will not put" but can find no verification of it. I'm not sure whether that would be mocking or apocryphal. Koyaanis Qatsi

Hi, new to the wikipedia thing I only looked here some time after I added the quote which you mentioned. I don't have a definitive attribution, but feel fairly confident about it. I think I will change the entry to indicate uncertainity. vanden 23:46, 3 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Your memory is pretty good. There's an oft-told story that, after someone complained that Churchill had ended a sentence with a preposition, he replied, "that is the sort of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put." --Christofurio 21:32, Nov 11, 2004 (UTC)

I believe this is apocryphal. Any kind of source would be nice, either way. Decklin 04:18, 9 October 2005 (UTC)

More discussion/analysis needed in article

This needs some more discussion/analysis of prepositions in general, rather than just lengthy analysis of whether one can properly end a sentence with a preposition in English.

A good point that needs to be made is that not using "prepositions" at the end of the sentence is based on an uneducated knowledge of Latin. It is true that Latin never ends a sentence in a preposition, however, verbs that are accompanied by "prepositions" in English are never construed as such in Latin but rather by a verb plus an indirect object form. For instance, the concept of 'to look at' in Latin is conveyed by the verb tueri:. Looking at English this way we can see that in reality in the sentence "I'm looking at the newspaper", 'at' isn't modifying 'the newspaper' instead it modifies the participle 'looking' semantically and 'the newspaper' is an indirect object. You can check this additionally by seeing that 'at' conveys different meaning depending on whether it's a preposition or a verb particle. As a preposition it conveys the meaning 'in' or 'near a place'. As a verbal particle, however, it conveys the meaning 'to' or 'towards'. I feel this is truly the best analysis of the situation and proves that the two usages do qualify as different parts of speech grammatically.

obJoke:

Texan: So, where ya from?

Briton: *sniff* I am from a place where one does not end one's sentences with prepositions.

Texan: Ok... Where ya from, jerk?

Kwertii 16:28, 27 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Along with some rearrangements, I have replaced the long example with smaller ones, and also added some information on prepositional phrases. Ziziphus 09:45, 8 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Is with A with B grammatical?

One thing I've been wondering is whether it's grammatical to use the same preposition twice in the same clause with different meanings. For example, "He argued with me with an angry expression". Is that allowable? Any grammarians care to explain this in the article? --Shibboleth 01:59, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)

It looks and sounds odd, but I don't think there's anything wrong with it. In the first part of the sentence, with is used as a function word. In the second part, with is signifying possession - the man has an angry expression.

It's grammatical. It does look a little unusual, but I wouldn't have any problem with it. "With" in English has a whole bunch of meanings; the first one here is an adversative or comitative, the second, an expression of circumstance. There's yet another meaning of "with": an expression of instrumentality. He argued with me with persuasion with an angry look on his face looks and sounds really bizarre, but it's grammatical.thefamouseccles

I've been thinking that this article needs an overhaul. Perhaps dividing it into sections for different types of prepositions (temporal, spatial, introductory) would be better, as well as providing some clearer examples and explanations of the sentence structure. --Ziziphus 12:55, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Separable Prefix Verbs != verb + preposition

I am not a native or fluent German speaker, but my understanding from my studies is that the separable prefix from a separable prefix verb is not a preposition but a different grammatical concept that does not exist in English. True, the separable prefix communicates some of the same information as a preposition, and it may very well be that the practice of placing prepositions at the end of a sentence derives from the separable prefix . . . BUT, the prefix (despite is separated status) is considered in German grammer to be part of the verb, not a separate word, and as far as I can remember never introduces a prepositional clause.

Notice that in the example, "Die Frau kommt um 7 Uhr in Köln an," the two prepositional clauses "um 7 Uhr" and "in Köln" already have leading prepositions.

kommen = to come ankommen = to arrive, but also "to attain" or "to catch on," according to my dictionary. It seems pretty clear to me that "an" modifies "kommen" exclusively. This is why it's called a separable prefix, it's a prefix (not a word) that can separate. -- 70.144.144.248 19:25, 4 Apr 2005 (UTC)

This is a largely formal distinction; best seen with a transitive separable verb:

Er kommt das Ziel an translates English He gets to the goal. It is easier for the German to treat this as compound verb + object; for the English-speaker to treat it as verb + prepositional phrase; but the two are equivalent, and I believe cognate. Septentrionalis 17:47, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Let's think about the terminology the first poster in this section is using. A prefix is an element that is 'attached in front of' a word. That's what the word means literally. A preposition is 'that which is placed in front of' a word. In German, logically speaking, a "separable prefix" is no longer a prefix if it's separated from the word it governs. In English, a preposition is no longer a preposition if it doesn't govern a word that follows. I feel that this is an instance, in argument, where terminology constrains one's ability to argue logically. What shall we call these two similar elements then? Descriptive linguistics uses the vague word 'particle' to designate these words. They refer to verbs with particles as 'particle verbs'.

Origin of Prepositions

I agree that this article should be fleshed out. From what I've heard, for instance, prepositions, prefixes, and adverbs in the Indo-European languages originate from adverbs. It makes most sense to me to treat the first two as adverbs when they show up in places that we least expect.

With the comparison of the Germanic languages to Latin, one might ask, "If Germanic maintained these Indo-European adverbs as verbal particles why didn't Latin do that also?" The answer lies in differences in word order. The Italic languages maintained the Indo-European word order of subj. obj. verb while the Germanic languages had much more flexibility and arrived at a word order of subj. verb obj. in independent clauses. Since these particles, like many other function words (e.g. prepositions, pronouns, etc) are unstressed there was a tendency to affix them to content words (e.g. verbs, nouns, adjectives), in this case verbs. In the Italic languages, due to the word order, this could be done easily. In the Germanic languages, however, the verbal particles would've occured after the verb due to the difference in word order. This prevented affixation of the unstressed particles. The reason for this is that inflectional ending, such as -s and -ed in modern English, get in the way and 'morphologically block' the suffixation of such elements as particles. Because of this they remained as separate elements in the Germanic languages except with the infinitive. The reason for this is that the infinitive only occurs near or at the end of the sentence in Common Germanic. As an example from modern German "Ich werde für dir ein Geschenk haben" = "I will have a gift for you" Since the order of such a sentence is subj. aux obj. obj. inf. (verb), similar to subj obj verb, the particles were prefixed in German and Old English as they were in Latin.

Adposition

I think this article should be merged with adposition along with postposition. Currently, adposition is merely a stub, and even if we include the quite large corpus of text in this article, it still wouldn't be too big to handle. Especially if we try limit the amount of examples. Adposition is the combined term and since placement is the only thing differing the various "-position", it doesn't seem all that useful to keep separate articles on them. At least not until it's grown too large to be housed in one article.

Peter ^Isotalo 16:53, 15 October 2005 (UTC)

No merge. If you have an article about grammar and you need preposition, postpostion or adposition explained, the article should do just that. Don't confuse people who need to know what a preposition is by redirecting them to adposition. Complete mergers are for articles which are about exactly the same topic, say "English prepositions" and "Prepositions in the English language". Since preposition, adposition and postposition are different grammatical terms, no merge. What you can do is move some parts of the text between the articles, but you can just do it without putting any tags in articles. -- Mkill 21:13, 23 October 2005 (UTC)

Agree. The preposition is a taxon entitled to its own description, and will be searched in that way. And the heirarchy of articles with adposition replicates its relationship to the larger category well.

As far as I know, all types of X-positions have more or less identical grammatical functions and the only thing varying is the syntax. They share functions to a much higher degree than they share syntactic placement. They describe the same kind of word class in many different languages, and it would therefor be a lot more useful to have an article that explains the terms in one common article. There are already signs that people have understood this, because preposition contains a whole paragraph on postpositions.

Please note that there is no reason to keep separate articles just to explain separate terms. If they get too big to be managable or practical to read and edit, that's another matter. Right now, they're anything but that. The structure of a merged adposition-article would simply be to have a short lead explaining that the different terms are very similar and three separate sections on each type of x-position.

Peter ^Isotalo 06:31, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

I agree with Peter Isotalo. When I first read this series of articles, I was a little annoyed at having to go round between three articles which said the same (and different) things in different places and different ways. One's enough, and redirs. —Felix the Cassowary (ɑe hɪː jɐ) 13:13, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

I expanded adposition and added som general discussion about both prepositions and postpositions. I won't merge any articles if people are vehemently opposed, but I must point out that there is a lot of fluff in this article that I really don't see much reason to keep at all. "English prescriptive guidelines", for example, is more about general normative usage of English grammar and is really not particularly relevant to anyone who wants to find out what a preposition is The Churchill quote and the Morris Bishop poem are really just pointless trivia. If you remove this as well as the info about postpositions, there won't be much left that can't easily be summarized in adposition.

Peter ^Isotalo 17:24, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

I oppose the merge. For one who is interested in prepositions, they may very well have no interest in adposition. If they are, a simple link is enough to connect them. By uselessly merging, we give more information that is not warranted to each searcher. As strongly connected as the two may be, we need to be organized in a manner that best benefits the user. Ted 23:27, 19 November 2005 (UTC)

The reasoning above is a very good reason to merge in itself. A preposition is an adposition, no matter how you look at it. No user is benefitted by believing they are different enough to merit separation.

Peter ^Isotalo 09:40, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

It's also so entirely generic that it's not (IMHO) worth using. Long vowel currently redirects to vowel length. But if a user types in "Long vowel", they presumably want to know stuff about long vowels, and not a distinction between long and short vowels! We should unredirect them. For that limited amount of information that is relevant to non-prepositional adpositions that is not relevant to prepositional adpositions, we can easily deal with that through the use of sections. One doesn't need to read the section "Postpositions" if you have no interest in them. —Felix the Cassowary (ɑe hɪː jɐ) 10:50, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

Very well, very well. Adposition is the article with which we should combine it. Ted 23:01, 1 December 2005 (UTC)