Prepositional pronoun

Last updated

A prepositional pronoun is a special form of a personal pronoun that is used as the object of a preposition.

Contents

English does not have a distinct grammatical case that relates solely to prepositional pronouns. Certain genitive pronouns [1] (e.g. a friend of hers; that dog of yours is as friendly as mine) both complement prepositions and also may function as subjects. Additionally, object pronouns (e.g. watch him; look at him) may complement either prepositions or transitive verbs. In some other languages, a special set of pronouns is required in prepositional contexts (although the individual pronouns in this set may also be found in other contexts).

Inflectional forms in Romance

In the Romance languages, prepositions combine with stressed pronominal forms that are distinct from the unstressed clitic pronouns used with verbs. In French, prepositions combine with disjunctive pronouns, which are also found in other syntactic contexts (see French disjunctive pronouns). In Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and Romanian, prepositions generally combine with pronouns that are identical in form to nominative (subject) pronouns, but there are unique prepositional forms for the 1st and 2nd person singular (and 3rd person reflexive). This is also true in Catalan, but the 2nd person singular prepositional form is identical to the nominative. Portuguese and Spanish also have unique forms for 1st, 2nd and 3rd person reflexive when they follow the preposition com/con ('with'). That holds true for both singular and plural pronouns for Portuguese, but only for singular in Spanish.

Consider the Portuguese sentences below:

Vejo-te todos os dias. (enclitic object of verb)
"I see you every day."
Não te culpo. (proclitic object of verb)
"I don't blame you."
Anseio por ti. (prepositional pronoun)
"I long for you."
Vou contigo. (prepositional pronoun after com)
"I'm going with you."

The verbs ver "to see" and culpar "to blame" in the first two sentences are non-prepositional, so they are accompanied by the normal object pronoun te "you". In the third sentence, the verb ansiar (por) "to long (for)" is prepositional, so its object, which follows the preposition, takes the form ti.

Prefixed forms in Slavic

In many Slavic languages (e.g. Czech, Polish, and Russian), prepositional pronouns have the same basic case-inflected forms as pronouns in other syntactic contexts. However, the 3rd person non-reflexive pronouns (which are vowel- or glide-initial) take the prefix n- when they are the object of a preposition. The following examples are from Russian:

Его

Him-GEN

здесь

here

нет.

not

Его здесь нет.

Him-GEN here not

"He's not here."

Я

I

это

this

делаю

do

для

for

него.

н-him-GEN

Я это делаю для него.

I this do for н-him-GEN

"I do this for him."

Я

I

наблюдаю

watch

его.

him-ACC

Я наблюдаю его.

I watch him-ACC

"I watch him."

Я

I

смотрю

look

на

on

него.

him-ACC

Я смотрю на него.

I look on him-ACC

"I look at him."

See also

Related Research Articles

In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun is a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase.

English grammar Grammar of the English language

English grammar is the way in which meanings are encoded into wordings in the English language. This includes the structure of words, phrases, clauses, sentences, and whole texts.

This article discusses the forms and functions of the personal pronouns in Catalan grammar.

The morphology of Irish is in some respects typical of an Indo-European language. Nouns are declined for number and case, and verbs for person and number. Nouns are classified by masculine or feminine gender. Other aspects of Irish morphology, while typical for an Insular Celtic language, are not typical for Indo-European, such as the presence of inflected prepositions and the initial consonant mutations. Irish syntax is also rather different from that of most Indo-European languages, due to its use of the verb–subject–object word order.

Russian grammar employs an Indo-European inflexional structure, with considerable adaptation.

The Portuguese personal pronouns and possessives display a higher degree of inflection than other parts of speech. Personal pronouns have distinct forms according to whether they stand for a subject (nominative), a direct object (accusative), an indirect object (dative), or a reflexive object. Several pronouns further have special forms used after prepositions.

A disjunctive pronoun is a stressed form of a personal pronoun reserved for use in isolation or in certain syntactic contexts.

In general linguistics, a reflexive pronoun, sometimes simply called a reflexive, is an anaphoric pronoun that must be coreferential with another nominal within the same clause.

English personal pronouns Closed lexical category of the English language

The Englishpersonal pronouns are a subset of English pronouns taking various forms according to number, person, case and natural gender. Modern English has very little inflection of nouns or adjectives, to the point where some authors describe it as an analytic language, but the Modern English system of personal pronouns has preserved some of the inflectional complexity of Old English and Middle English.

French personal pronouns reflect the person and number of their referent, and in the case of the third person, its gender as well. They also reflect the role they play in their clause: subject, direct object, indirect object, or other.

French pronouns are inflected to indicate their role in the sentence, as well as to reflect the person, gender, and number of their referents.

The grammar of the Polish language is characterized by a high degree of inflection, and has relatively free word order, although the dominant arrangement is subject–verb–object (SVO). There are no articles, and there is frequent dropping of subject pronouns. Distinctive features include the different treatment of masculine personal nouns in the plural, and the complex grammar of numerals and quantifiers.

German pronouns are German words that function as pronouns. As with pronouns in other languages, they are frequently employed as the subject or object of a clause, acting as substitutes for nouns or noun phrases, but are also used in relative clauses to relate the main clause to a subordinate one.

This article describes the grammar of Tigrinya, a South Semitic language which is spoken primarily in Eritrea and Ethiopia, and is written in Ge'ez script.

This article describes the grammar of the Scottish Gaelic language.

In the Latvian language, nouns, adjectives, pronouns and numerals are inflected in six declensions. There are seven cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative and vocative.

Gothic is an inflected language, and as such its nouns, pronouns, and adjectives must be declined in order to serve a grammatical function. A set of declined forms of the same word pattern is called a declension. There are five grammatical cases in Gothic with a few traces of an old sixth instrumental case.

In Russian grammar, the system of declension is elaborate and complex. Nouns, pronouns, adjectives, demonstratives, most numerals and other particles are declined for two grammatical numbers and six grammatical cases (see below); some of these parts of speech in the singular are also declined by three grammatical genders. This gives many spelling combinations for most of the words, which is needed for grammatical agreement within and (often) outside the proposition. Also, there are several paradigms for each declension with numerous irregular forms.

Spanish personal pronouns Personal pronouns in Spanish

Spanish personal pronouns have distinct forms according to whether they stand for the subject (nominative) or object, and third-person pronouns make an additional distinction for direct object (accusative) or indirect object (dative), and for reflexivity as well. Several pronouns also have special forms used after prepositions.

The grammar of the Manx language has much in common with related Indo-European languages, such as nouns that display gender, number and case and verbs that take endings or employ auxiliaries to show tense, person or number. Other morphological features are typical of Insular Celtic languages but atypical of other Indo-European languages. These include initial consonant mutation, inflected prepositions and verb–subject–object word order.

References