Prepositions - Words That Glue

Now let’s explore a very important part of speech, the preposition. This little word helps us hook nouns onto sentences. When we do, we form prepositional phrases. When you complete this section, you might decide that a preposition is a good word to end a sentence with. And you might not.

When we studied nouns, we saw their need for quite a bit of help when they want to jump up on the back of a sentence and stay there. Verbs serve as one source of glue helping nouns stick to sentences. Verbs will stick nouns acting as subjects, direct objects, indirect objects, complements, and verbal objects.

The other big dab of glue sticking nouns to sentences is the preposition. Fact is, noun-sticking is the preposition’s main reason for being.

So one day in Amber and Igor’s cave, Igor was trying to construct a sentence:

I want to put the urn . . . table.

He looked at the urn and then at the table and figured he would put the urn on the table. Then he tried to put it under the table, next to the table, above the table, away from the table. He found he could put the urn all over the place in relation to the table, and the words he invented to describe those relationships he promptly dubbed:

prepositions

After all, what else could he call them?

Thus, to stick the noun urn on the back of the sentence, Igor needed a preposition to pull it off. As the language of the tribe grew, so did the list of prepositions, which enabled speakers, and later writers, to express a wide array of relationships between the noun (or pronoun) stuck to the sentence and the sentence itself.

Amber, Igor, Miss Hamrick, and the Preposition Committee actually devised three types of prepositions:

1. simple prepositions 2. marginal prepositions 3. compound prepositions

 

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