We’ve made quite a bit of progress with our languages since the beginning. They’ve got nouns, pronouns, verbs, and adjectives. We’ve given them plenty of grammar to connect these bits and turn them into sentences. But those sentences are pretty bland. And that’s because there’s no real way for our conlangs to express anything but the most basic of semantic relationships: subject and object. To remedy that, we’re going to talk about a new type of phrase, the prepositional phrase.
English, for example
Prepositional phrases are everywhere you look in English. That last sentence, in fact, ended with one: “in English”. This type of phrase isn’t absolutely necessary to the grammatical “core” of a sentence. It’s extra information that fills in the blanks, giving us more detail about a situation. Prepositional phrases are the way we can learn wheres and whens and hows about something. They’re filler, but that’s exactly what we need.
Looking at English—we’ve got a whole post full of examples, so there’s no reason not to—we can see the general structure of a prepositional phrase. It starts with a preposition, naturally enough, and that’s really the head of the phrase. Prepositions are those words like “in”, “of”, or “below”; they can specify position, location, time, possession, and about a hundred other ideas that are impossible (or just cumbersome) to express with only a verb, subject, and object.
Besides the preposition, the rest of the prepositional phrase is, well, a phrase. It’s usually a noun phrase, but English allows plenty of other options, like gerunds (“in passing“) and adverbs (“until recently“). In theory, there’s nothing stopping a language from letting whole sentences be put into prepositional phrases (“after I came home“), but phrases like that are technically a different kind that we’ll see in a future post. For now, we’ll stick with the more noun-like examples.
Changing it up
English isn’t the only (or even the best) example of how to do prepositional phrases. Other languages do things differently. So, let’s take a look at how they do it.
The first thing to say is that this post’s whole premise is a lie. You don’t need prepositions. You don’t have to have a word that precedes a noun phrase to give more information about a sentence. No, it’s actually a bit more common (according to WALS Chapter 85) to put the preposition after the noun phrase. In that case, it’s not really proper to call it a preposition anymore; pre-, after all, means “before”. So linguists call these words postpositions. Japanese, for instance, uses postpositions, and any anime lover knows of の (no). Thus, “preposition” is technically a misnomer, and the more general term (which we won’t use here) is adposition.
Even rarer types exist, too. There’s the inposition, which pops up in a few languages. It goes somewhere in the middle of the noun phrase. The circumposition has bits that go on either side of the phrase, and this (so Wikipedia says) appears in Pashto and Kurdish. It’s sort of like the French phrasing seen in je ne sais pas. And then there are a few oddballs that don’t seem to have any of these, using verbs or case markers or something like that as stand-ins.
What can fit in the “phrase” part of “prepositional phrase” varies from one language to the next, as well. Noun phrases are let in pretty much everywhere. Not every language has adverbs, though, unless you’re of the belief that any word that doesn’t fit in another class is automatically an adverb. Gerunds aren’t ubiquitous, either. And, of course, languages can go the other way, allowing more possibilities than English.
A note on adverbs
We haven’t really discussed adverbs much, and there’s a good reason: nobody can agree on just what an adverb really is. Sure, it’s easy to say that adverbs are to verbs what adjectives are to nouns, but that doesn’t help much. If you look at it that way, then a prepositional phrase can also be an adverbial phrase. Similarly, some languages—Irish, for example—create regular adverbs by means of a prepositional phrase, their equivalent to English “-ly”. On the other hand, it’s entirely possible for a language to give its adjectives the ability to function as adverbs, as in Dutch.
For a conlang, adverbs are a hard thing to get right. It’s easy to be regular, much harder to be naturalistic. Esperanto mostly goes the regular route, with its productive -e suffix, but there are a few exceptions like hodiau “today”. The best advice I can give here is to have a little bit of both. Have a regular way to derive adverbial meaning from adjectives, but also have a few words that aren’t derived.
In conclusion
How your conlang handles prepositions isn’t something I can tell you. I can give you a few pointers, though. First, there’s a tendency for head-final languages (SOV word order, adjectives preceding nouns, etc.) to use postpositions. This is by no means universal, but it’s something to think about.
And the end of that last sentence brings up another point that often gets overlooked. Can you end a sentence with a preposition? You can in English. The only reason it’s considered “bad” is because of the influence of Latin, which doesn’t allow it. Clearly, a postposition can end a sentence, by its very nature, but the waters are murkier for those that come before. When we get to relative clauses in the next part of the series, the question will be more relevant, but it might be good to have an answer when that time comes.
Other things to consider are what types of phrases can be put in a preposition, where they fit in a sentence (before the verb, after it, at the end, or wherever), case marking (some languages have prepositions that require their nouns to go in a specific case, while case-heavy languages can go with a smaller set of prepositions), person marking (a few languages require this on the preposition), and the relation between prepositional and other types of phrases. And, of course, the main question: do you have prepositions at all?
Once you’re through all that, you’ve greatly increased the expressive power of your language. Not only can you tell what happened and who did it, but now you can specify where, when, why, and how.