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Preposition   Listen
Preposition

noun
1.
A function word that combines with a noun or pronoun or noun phrase to form a prepositional phrase that can have an adverbial or adjectival relation to some other word.
2.
(linguistics) the placing of one linguistic element before another (as placing a modifier before the word it modifies in a sentence or placing an affix before the base to which it is attached).



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"Preposition" Quotes from Famous Books



... a present participle with a preposition used absolutely (not governing the following noun); the putting-in or taking-out ...
— Compound Words - Typographic Technical Series for Apprentices #36 • Frederick W. Hamilton

... | mes | e|ra | de | ma|yo cuan|do | ha|ce | la | ca|lor. (p. 7, l. 1-2) page lv Hiatus was common in Old Spanish, except when the first of two words was the definite article, a personal pronoun-object or the preposition de; or when the ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various

... Tim. iv. 14. That the preposition [Greek: meta] here indicates the instrumental cause, see Acts ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen

... in city politics,—had promised to secure for Cassius an appointment as an enforcement officer in the great war that was being waged against prohibition. This seemed to make such a hit with the jury that Smilk's lawyer shrewdly decided not to press her to alter the preposition. ...
— Yollop • George Barr McCutcheon

... destruction (as in fordn, forgiefan), or is intensitive or pejorative, as in forbrnan, forrotian. It is not connected with the preposition 'for.' Its original form was fer- [cp. Ger. ver-]. II. occly ...
— A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary - For the Use of Students • John R. Clark Hall

... and pleasantly. Trees and bushes did not allow many glimpses of the outside world. The dogs that barked were behind farmhouse gates, and we had use for our stones only at an occasional jackrabbit. "At" is a convenient preposition. It gives one latitude. Jackrabbits on the Riviera are not like human products of the south. They jump quickly. They jump, too, in directions that cannot be foretold. After one particularly bad throw, the Artist explained that he did not enjoy inflicting pain. His boyish instincts had long ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons

... The Preposition is also customary with the Accusatives urbem or oppidum when they stand in apposition with the name of a ...
— New Latin Grammar • Charles E. Bennett

... subordinate member of some assertion. We may notice, too, that the relative pronoun, unlike the rest, is necessarily syncategorematic, for the same reason as the subjunctive mood. Of the remaining parts of speech the article, adverb, preposition, and conjunction can never be anything but syncategorematic, while the interjection is acategorematic, like the vocative case of nouns and the imperative and optative moods of verbs, which do not enter at all into the form of ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock

... a este hombre: (a from). The preposition a is regularly used with the value of the English from, after verbs like ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon

... backwards over the chair, and went rolling about the floor in an ecstasy of enjoyment. The king picked her up easier than one does a down quilt, and replaced her in her former relation to the chair. The exact preposition expressing this relation I do not happen ...
— Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know • Various

... this quarter-eagle's leveled face, The Lord's Prayer, legibly inscribed, I trace. "Our Father which"—the pronoun there is funny, And shows the scribe to have addressed the money— "Which art in Heaven"—an error this, no doubt: The preposition should be stricken out. Needless to quote; I only have designed To praise the frankness of the pious mind Which thought it natural and right to join, With rare significancy, prayer ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce

... ideas that it is impossible to render except by way of such and such parts of speech? What can be done with the "to" of "he came to the house"? Well, we can say "he reached the house" and dodge the preposition altogether, giving the verb a nuance that absorbs the idea of local relation carried by the "to." But let us insist on giving independence to this idea of local relation. Must we not then hold to ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir

... Tischen}. Great care must always be taken in rendering the preposition, {an}on (mostly of time); at, near, near by, by the side of; to ...
— Eingeschneit - Eine Studentengeschichte • Emil Frommel

... as to whether it is more correct to say a person "overlays" or "overlies" a child, and the question came up in committee on the bill. According to Sir J.A.H. Murray (see Letter in The Times, 12th of May 1908) "to lie," an intransitive verb, becomes transitive when combined with a preposition, e.g. a nurse lies over a child or overlies a child; "to lay" is the causal derivative of "to lie," and is followed by two objects, e.g. to lay the table with a cloth, or to lay a cloth on the table; similarly, to overlay a surface with varnish, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various

... in saying that he did not know the difference between a verb and a preposition," said Mr. Voorhes, "but during the grammar lesson he could make a drawing of the face of the teacher that was in no sense a caricature. This phase of his ability gave me a cue to what might be done for him. Knowing both ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing

... speaker the author admits, that how to get a grip on his hearers outweighed the grammar of language; that the ring of sincerity and truth in presenting a proposition appealed to him more than relation of pronoun or preposition; besides in the "high school of hard knocks" from which he graduated artistic taste in literature ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain

... argument is "laughable," which should obviously be "laugh-at-able." These remarks are made quite without prejudice, for personally I have little to complain of. (By the way, this sentence is as open to blame as that of the professor who told his pupils "You must not use a preposition to end a sentence with.") Though I have sat under an army of critics, I have but once been accused of inelegant English, and then it was only by a lady who wrote that my ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill

... the final syllable being long by position. Pedantic grammarians might argue that natus being a participle ought not to govern a genitive case, but should be followed by a preposition with the ablative case, and that we ought to say "e Bacone nati" or "de Bacone nati." Other pedants have declared that natus is properly, i.e., classically, said of the mother only, although in low Latin, such as the Vulgate, we find ...
— Bacon is Shake-Speare • Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence

... original, 'Pressed by.' Boswell, in thus changing the preposition, forgot what Johnson says in his Plan of an English Dictionary (Works, v. 12):—'We say, according to the present modes of speech, The soldier died of his wounds, and the sailor perished with hunger; and every man acquainted with our language would be offended ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill

... article: gajo or gorgio, a man or gentile; o gajo, the man. The noun has two numbers, the singular and the plural. It has various cases formed by postpositions, but has, strictly speaking, no genitive. It has prepositions as well as postpositions; sometimes the preposition is used with the noun and sometimes the postposition: for example, cad o gav, from the town; chungale mannochendar, evil men from, i.e. from evil men. The verb has no infinitive; in lieu thereof, the conjunction 'that' is placed before some ...
— Romano Lavo-Lil - Title: Romany Dictionary - Title: Gypsy Dictionary • George Borrow

... handsome nor accomplished. The most his best friends could say of him was, that he was "a very worthy young man." He was not an orator: he had an atrocious delivery, and rarely got through the briefest epistle, or collect even, without blundering over a preposition. His demeanour in pulpit and reading-desk was that of a prisoner at the bar, without hope of acquittal, and yet he had won Miss Granger—that prize in the matrimonial market, which many a stout Yorkshireman ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon

... popular Latin, as early as the time of Plautus, we see a tendency to adopt our modern method of indicating the relation which a substantive bears to some other word in the sentence by means of a preposition rather than by simply using a case form. The careless Roman was inclined to say, for instance, magna pars de exercitu, rather than to use the genitive case of the word for army, magna pars exercitus. Perhaps it seemed ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott

... between words having a close syntactical relation, particularly if the initial vowel of the second word is in a constituent syllable. It may occur between the article and its substantive, the possessive adjective and its substantive, a preposition and its object, the negatives no and ni and a following vowel; and after the conjunctions y, que, si, and other words having a weak accent such as desde, ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer

... us teach, That it hath nine parts of speech;— Article, adjective, and noun, Verb, conjunction, and pronoun, With preposition, and adverb, And interjection, as I've heard. The letters are just twenty-six, These form all words when rightly mix'd. The vowels are a, e, o, i, With u, and sometimes w and y. Without the little vowels' aid, No word or syllable is made; But consonants the rest we call, ...
— The Infant System - For Developing the Intellectual and Moral Powers of all Children, - from One to Seven years of Age • Samuel Wilderspin

... "but you taught by example that a verb should not agree with its subject in person and number, whereas the Good Book says that contention is worse than a dinner of herbs. You also tried to release the objective case from its thraldom to the preposition, and it is written that servants should obey their masters. ...
— Fantastic Fables • Ambrose Bierce

... A preposition governing the word modified by the genitive, precedes the genitive:[2] On ealdra manna sgenum, In old men's sayings; t :ra str:ta endum, At the ends of the streets (literally, At the ...
— Anglo-Saxon Grammar and Exercise Book - with Inflections, Syntax, Selections for Reading, and Glossary • C. Alphonso Smith

... After all words preceded or followed by an ellipse; 2. After words used in apostrophe, as Monsieur, Madame; 3. After conjunctions and interjections when there is silence; 4. After all transpositions; for example: To live, one must work. Here the preposition to takes the value of its natural antecedent, work; that is to say, six degrees, since by inversion it precedes it, and the gesture of the sentence bears wholly on the preposition; 5. Before and after incidental phrases; 6. Wherever we wish ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various

... Relative Pronouns.—Relative pronouns may be used as subject, object, object of a preposition, subject of an infinitive, and ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks

... converse in the language as to be understood in most things belonging to eating and drinking, buying and selling, etc. My ear is somewhat familiarised to the Bengali sounds. It is a language of a very singular construction, having no plural except for pronouns, and not a single preposition in it: but the cases of nouns and pronouns are almost endless, all the words answering to our prepositions being put after the word, and forming a new case. Except these singularities, I find it an easy language. I feel myself happy in my present undertaking; for, though I never felt the loss of ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith

... One of the many cases in which the French preposition has been incorporated in the name. Cf. Danvers, for d'Anvers, Antwerp, ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley

... late texts the final n of the preposition on is frequently lost when it occurs in a compound word or stereotyped phrase, and the prefix then appears as a: abtan, amang, aweg, aright, adr'dan."—Cook's ...
— Beowulf • James A. Harrison and Robert Sharp, eds.

... what a change in sprightliness of habits is here! Time has worn away his head and limbs to almost unrecognisable blunt excrescences. Bid him move off into the oblique cases, and if he can help it, he will not budge; you must shove him with a verb; you must goad him with a little sharp preposition behind; and then he just lumps backward or forward, and there is no change for the better in him, as you may say. No longer will he declare his meaning of himself; it must depend on where you choose to put him in the sentence.—Among the mountains of Europe, ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris

... a noun to a verb, to another noun, or to a preposition is called its case. There are three cases called the nominative, objective, and possessive. When the noun does something it is in the nominative case and is called the ...
— Word Study and English Grammar - A Primer of Information about Words, Their Relations and Their Uses • Frederick W. Hamilton

... substantive proper; first person singular, face—' Miss Darner stopped a moment, and then went on with, 'Miss Jane Adair,—temper, syntax; consisting of concord and government; speech, a preposition; voice, liquids; face, mind, and figure, in the superlative degree; as the verb to be loved, second person singular, indicative mood, present tense, to myself and others. The remainder, excepting Miss Arden, may be classed with mutes, crotchets, irregular verbs, ...
— The Boarding School • Unknown

... against thy Help.' Obviously, some words must be supplied to bring out any sense. Our Authorised Version has chosen the supplement 'is,' which fails to observe the second occurrence with 'thy Help' of the preposition, and is somewhat lax in rendering the 'for' of the second clause by the neutral 'but.' It is probably better to read, as the Revised Version, with most modern interpreters, 'Thou art against Me, against ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren

... columns beside the half-domes stands Ralph Stackpole's "Thought." The semicircle of female figures in the vestibule of the dome of the Palace of Education, bearing in their hands books with the motto "Ex Libris," though the preposition is omitted, represents the store of knowledge in books. The similar array of men bearing wreaths of cereals in the half-dome of the Palace of Food Products signifies the source of vigor in the fruits of the soil. The simple Italian fountains in the vestibules, ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber

... soul-self') has the implied meaning of association ('together with this soul-self'); for if a case can be taken in its primary sense, it is not proper to understand it in a sense which has to be expressed by means of a preposition. But the third case, jivena, cannot here be understood even in its primary sense, i.e. that of the instrument of the action; for if Brahman is the agent in the acts of entering and differentiating, the soul is not that which is most ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut

... that which conceals: it is a fraud, and speaketh not the truth. I am not even certain whether it is a noun or a preposition, but the point is immaterial. Along with other canons of military matters, its virtue lies in its application rather than in its etymology. What the eye doth not see the trench mortars do not trouble is as true to-day as when Noah first mentioned the fact; ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile

... be heard, and wished to be allowed to address the assembly as a member of the Council, and for that purpose resigned the Presidentship to Chasal. He begged that the General might be introduced again and heard with calmness. But this preposition was furiously opposed. Exclamations of "Outlaw Bonaparte! outlaw him!" rang through the assembly, and were the only reply given to the President. Lucien, who had reassumed the President's chair, left it a second time, that he might ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne

... but very significant, phrase—"Out of"—not into, but "out of." All the difference in the lives of men lies in the difference between these two expressions. "Into" is the world's preposition. Every stream turns in; and that means a dead sea. Many a man's life is simply the coast line of a dead sea. "Out of" is the Master's word. His thought is of others. The stream must flow in, and ...
— Quiet Talks on Power • S.D. Gordon



Words linked to "Preposition" :   object of a preposition, place, linguistics, function word, prepose, closed-class word, position



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