Лекции по теоретической грамматике английского языка. Тивьяева И.В. - 69 стр.

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3. She sent the letter to John.

In all these examples the prepositions have no identifiable meaning of their

own: it is only in the co-text that we can say what meaning they express. In (1) by

marks the element that is the Agent; in (2) of marks the possessive relationship

between the speech and the president; in (3) to marks the Recipient.

In their grammatical functions, prepositions are similar to inflections in

synthetic languages.

Cf. interviewed by the police: допрошены полицией;

the speech of the President: речь президента;

sent to John: отправила Джону.

As already indicated, non-grammatical prepositions can be divided into

spatial and non-spatial, the term spatial including two types of space: non-temporal

and temporal. Spatial non-temporal prepositions mark the position of entities with

respect to each other: one entity is treated as a reference point (the deictic centre)

with respect to which another is located.

Morphological features

Structurally, prepositions fall into two categories: simple

, or one-word,

prepositions (in, on, for, to, about, after, etc.) and composite

, or two- or threeword,

prepositions (ahead of, because of, according to; by means of, at the cost of, with

reference to, etc.).

However, not all scholars recognize the existence of composite prepositions.

According to Prof. Ilyish, we cannot term these groups prepositions, since a

preposition is a word, not a word group, and it is essential to keep up the

distinction between words and word groups. The term "compound preposition" is

too vague and is not conducive to a clear and consistent grammatical theory.

Syntactic features

As far as phrases are concerned, the function of prepositions is to connect

words with each other. On the sentence level: a preposition is never a part of a

sentence by itself; it enters the part of sentence whose main centre is the following

noun, or pronoun, or gerund. It won’t be correct to say that prepositions connect