Adpositional phrase

An adpositional phrase, in linguistics, is a syntactic category that includes prepositional phrases, postpositional phrases, and circumpositional phrases.^[1] Adpositional phrases contain an adposition (preposition, postposition, or circumposition) as head and usually a complement such as a noun phrase. Language syntax treats adpositional phrases as units that act as arguments or adjuncts. Prepositional and postpositional phrases differ by the order of the words used. Languages that are primarily head-initial such as English predominantly use prepositional phrases whereas head-final languages predominantly employ postpositional phrases. Many languages have both types, as well as circumpositional phrases.

Types

There are three types of adpositional phrases: prepositional phrases, postpositional phrases, and circumpositional phrases.

Adolescence is a transitional term for a child who is 13-18 years old. Adolescence is a period of human transition from childhood to adulthood. At this stage, adolescents begin to look for identity. However, not a few that lead to delinquency behavior that deviates from adolescents and hurts themselves and others. Juvenile delinquency is an act that violates norms, rules, or laws in society commit eat the age of adolescence or the transition from childhood to adulthood. Juvenile delinquency is a social pathological symptom of adolescents causes by a form of social neglect which ultimately leads to deviant behavior. Juvenile delinquency can occur in groups or individually. The development of westernization creates a free environment for adolescents. Because promiscuity and lack of knowledge possessed by a teenager can be one of the causes of juvenile delinquency. The emotions that adolescents have are still unstable. If these emotions cannot control, they will cause violence that can be detrimental to themselves and others. Juvenile delinquency can take the form of promiscuity, vandalism, harassment, acts of bullying, to cases involving dead victims, such as murder. Juvenile delinquency currently developing caused of several factors, namely internal factors, and external factors. Internal factors include identity crisis, negative traits that lead to naughty acts, inability to adapt to changes in a good and creative environment, not having healthy hobbies, as well as hidden problems, and unwillingness to tell others. External factors include lack of attention and affection from parents. A child with a broken home, a broken family due to the death of one parent, a difficult family economy, and severe conflicts can certainly have a negative influence on children's attitudes and behavior. Second, comprehension understanding religion, in this case, parents need to provide good religious education to children from an early age. Because through religious education children can get moral values that apply in society. Third, the place of education, children can do various actions or attitudes that violate the empty hours of lessons. For example, making noise, fighting, or bullying classmates. That way, schools must be responsible for fostering and guiding each student to behave and make good use of time. In addition, each teacher is also tasked with maintaining harmony between students.

Postpositional phrases

Postpositional elements are frequent in head-final languages such as Basque, Estonian, Finnish, Georgian, Korean, Japanese, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali and Tamil. The word or other morpheme that corresponds to an English preposition occurs after its complement, hence the name postposition. The following examples are from Japanese, where the case markers perform a role similar to that of adpositions:

a. ..mise ni

store to = 'to the store'

b. ..ie kara

house from = 'from the house'

c. ..hashi de

chopsticks with = 'with chopsticks'

And from Finnish, where the case endings perform a role similar to that of adpositions:

a. ..kauppaan

store.to = 'to the store'

b. ..talosta

house.from = 'from the house'

c. ..puikoilla

chopsticks.with = 'with chopsticks'

While English is generally seen as lacking postpositions entirely, there are a couple of words that one can in fact view as postpositions, e.g. the crisis two years ago, sleep the whole night through. Since a phrase like two years ago distributes just like a prepositional phrase, one can argue that ago should be classified as a postposition, as opposed to as an adjective or adverb.

Circumpositional phrases

Circumpositional phrases involve both a preposition and a postposition, whereby the complement appears between the two. Circumpositions are common in Pashto and Kurdish. English has at least one circumpositional construction, e.g.

a. From now on, he won't help.

German has more of them, e.g.

b. Von mir aus kannst du das machen.

From me out can you that do = 'As far as I'm concerned, you can do it.'

c. Um der Freundschaft willen sollst du es machen.

around the friendship sake should you it do = 'For the sake of friendship, you should do it.'

Represention

Like with all other types of phrases, theories of syntax render the syntactic structure of adpositional phrases using trees. The trees that follow represent adpositional phrases according to two modern conventions for rendering sentence structure, first in terms of the constituency relation of phrase structure grammars and then in terms of the dependency relation of dependency grammars. The following labels are used on the nodes in the trees: Adv = adverb, N = nominal (noun or pronoun), P = preposition/postposition, and PP = pre/postpositional phrase:^[2]

These phrases are identified as prepositional phrases by the placement of PP at the top of the constituency trees and of P at the top of the dependency trees. English also has a number of two-part prepositional phrases, i.e. phrases that can be viewed as containing two prepositions, e.g.

Assuming that ago in English is indeed a postposition as suggested above, a typical ago-phrase would receive the following structural analyses:

The analysis of circumpositional phrases is not so clear, since it is not obvious which of the two adpositions should be viewed as the head of the phrase. However, the following analyses are more in line with the fact that English is primarily a head-initial language:

Distribution

The distribution of prepositional phrases in English can be characterized in terms of heads and dependents. Prepositional phrases typically appear as postdependents of nouns, adjectives, and finite and non-finite verbs, although they can also appear as predependents of finite verbs, for instance when they initiate clauses. For ease of presentation, just dependency trees are now employed to illustrate these points. The following trees show prepositional phrases as postdependents of nouns and adjectives:

And the following trees show prepositional phrases as postdependents of non-finite verbs and as predependents of finite verbs:

Attempts to position a prepositional phrase in front of its head noun, adjective, or non-finite verb are bad, e.g.

a. his departure on Tuesday

b. *his on Tuesday departure

a. proud of his grade

b. *of his grade proud

a. He is leaving on Tuesday.

b. *He is on Tuesday leaving.

The b-examples demonstrate that prepositional phrases in English prefer to appear as postdependents of their heads. The fact, however, that they can at times appear as a predependent of their head (as in the finite clauses above) is curious.

Function

More often than not, a given adpositional phrase is an adjunct in the clause or noun phrase that it appears in. These phrases can also, however, function as arguments, in which case they are known as oblique:

a. She ran under him. - Adjunct at the clause level

b. The man from China was enjoying his noodles. - Adjunct in a noun phrase.

c. He gave money to the cause. - Oblique argument at the clause level

d. She argued with him. - Oblique Argument at the clause level

e. A student of physics attended. - Argument in a noun phrase

Particles

A prepositional phrase should not be confused with a sequence formed by the particle and the direct object of a phrasal verb. Phrasal verbs often consist of a verb and a particle, whereby the particle is mistakenly interpreted to be a preposition, e.g.

a. He turned on the light. - on is a particle, not a preposition

b. He turned it on. - Shifting identifies on as a particle

a. She made up a story. - up is a particle, not a preposition

b. She made it up. - Shifting identifies up as a particle

a. They put off the party. - off is a particle, not a preposition

b. They put it off. - Shifting identifies off as a particle.

Particles are identified by shifting, i.e. the particle can switch places with the object when the object is a pronoun. Prepositions cannot do this, i.e. they cannot switch positions with their complement, e.g. He is relying on Susan vs. *He is relying her on.

Notes

^ Adpositional phrases are discussed by, for instance, Stockwell (1977:60ff.), Lockwood (2002:54f.), and Tallerman (2005:48f.).
^ Phrase structure trees like the ones here can be found in, for instance, Brinton (2000), and dependency grammar trees like the ones here can be found in Osborne et al. (2011).

References

Brinton, L. 2000. The structure of modern English: A linguistic introduction.
Lockwood, D. 2002. Syntactic analysis and description: A constructional approach. London: Continuum.
Osborne, T., M. Putnam, and T. Groß 2011. Bare phrase structure, label-less trees, and specifier-less syntax: Is Minimalism becoming a dependency grammar? The Linguistic Review 28, 315–364.
Stockwell, R. 1977. Foundations of syntactic theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Tallerman, M. 2005. Understanding syntax. 2nd edition. London: Hodder Arnold.
Tesnière, L. 1959. Éleménts de syntaxe structurale. Paris: Klincksieck.

[1] Adpositional phrases are discussed by, for instance, Stockwell (1977:60ff.), Lockwood (2002:54f.), and Tallerman (2005:48f.).

[2] Phrase structure trees like the ones here can be found in, for instance, Brinton (2000), and dependency grammar trees like the ones here can be found in Osborne et al. (2011).

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