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A Dictionary of Modern English Usage

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A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926), by Henry Watson Fowler (1858–1933), is a style guide to British English usage , pronunciation, and writing. Covering topics such as plurals and literary technique , distinctions among like words ( homonyms and synonyms ), and the use of foreign terms, the dictionary became the standard for other style guides to writing in English. Hence, the 1926 first edition remains in print, along with the 1965 second edition, edited by Ernest Gowers , which was reprinted in 1983 and 1987. The 1996 third edition was re-titled as The New Fowler's Modern English Usage , and revised in 2004, was mostly rewritten by Robert W. Burchfield , as a usage dictionary that incorporated corpus linguistics data; and the 2015 fourth edition, revised and re-titled Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage , was edited by Jeremy Butterfield, as a usage dictionary. Informally, readers refer to the style guide and dictionary as Fowler's Modern English Usage , Fowler , and Fowler's .

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76-412: In A Dictionary of Modern English Usage , H. W. Fowler's general approach encourages a direct, vigorous writing style, and opposes all artificiality, by firmly advising against convoluted sentence construction, the use of foreign words and phrases, and the use of archaisms. He opposed pedantry, and ridiculed artificial grammar rules unwarranted by natural English usage, such as bans on ending a sentence with

152-414: A grammatical relationship that links its complement to another word or phrase in the context. It also generally establishes a semantic relationship, which may be spatial ( in , on , under , ...), temporal ( after , during , ...), or of some other type ( of , for , via , ...). The World Atlas of Language Structures treats a word as an adposition if it takes a noun phrase as a complement and indicates

228-498: A language family of more than 35 documented languages, spoken by the Turkic peoples of Eurasia from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe to Central Asia , East Asia , North Asia ( Siberia ), and West Asia . The Turkic languages originated in a region of East Asia spanning from Mongolia to Northwest China , where Proto-Turkic is thought to have been spoken, from where they expanded to Central Asia and farther west during

304-473: A noun phrase , this being called its complement , or sometimes object . English generally has prepositions rather than postpositions – words such as in, under and of precede their objects, such as in England , under the table , of Jane – although there are a few exceptions including ago and notwithstanding , as in "three days ago" and "financial limitations notwithstanding". Some languages that use

380-524: A prefix to a verb . As noted above, adpositions typically have noun phrases as complements. This can include nominal clauses and certain types of non-finite verb phrase: The word to when it precedes the infinitive in English is not a preposition, but rather is a grammatical particle outside of any main word class . In other cases, the complement may have the form of an adjective or adjective phrase , or an adverbial. This may be regarded as

456-400: A preposition , rules on the placement of the word only , and rules distinguishing between which and that . He classified and condemned every cliché , in the course of which he coined and popularised the terms battered ornament , vogue words , and worn-out humour , while defending useful distinctions between words whose meanings were coalescing in practice, thereby guiding the speaker and

532-535: A certain case (e.g., ἐν always takes its object in the dative), while other prepositions may take their object in one of two or more cases, depending on the meaning of the preposition (e.g., διά takes its object in the genitive or the accusative, depending on the meaning). Some languages have cases that are used exclusively after prepositions ( prepositional case ), or special forms of pronouns for use after prepositions ( prepositional pronoun ). The functions of adpositions overlap with those of case markings (for example,

608-514: A complement representing a different syntactic category , or simply as an atypical form of noun phrase (see nominalization ). In the last example, the complement of the preposition from is in fact another prepositional phrase. The resulting sequence of two prepositions ( from under ) may be regarded as a complex preposition; in some languages, such a sequence may be represented by a single word, as Russian из-под iz-pod ("from under"). Some adpositions appear to combine with two complements: It

684-445: A different word order have postpositions instead (like Turkic languages ) or have both types (like Finnish ). The phrase formed by an adposition together with its complement is called an adpositional phrase (or prepositional phrase, postpositional phrase, etc.). Such a phrase can function as an adjective or as an adverb. A less common type of adposition is the circumposition , which consists of two parts that appear on each side of

760-635: A grammar and usage guide. Assisted in the research by Francis, who died in 1918 of tuberculosis contracted (1915–16) whilst serving with the British Expeditionary Force in the First World War (1914–1918), Henry dedicated the first edition of the Dictionary to his late brother: I think of it as it should have been, with its prolixities docked, its dullnesses enlivened, its fads eliminated, its truths multiplied. He had

836-417: A group of words that act as one unit. Examples of complex prepositions in English include in spite of , with respect to , except for , by dint of , and next to . The distinction between simple and complex adpositions is not clear-cut. Many complex adpositions are derived from simple forms (e.g., with + in → within , by + side → beside ) through grammaticalisation . This change takes time, and during

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912-498: A nimbler wit, a better sense of proportion, and a more open mind, than his twelve-year-older partner; and it is a matter of regret that we had not, at a certain point, arranged our undertakings otherwise than we did.   ... This present book accordingly contains none of his actual writing; but, having been designed in consultation with him, it is the last fruit of a partnership that began in 1903 with our translation of Lucian . The first edition of A Dictionary of Modern English Usage

988-416: A noun, e.g., a gerund ), together with its specifier and modifiers such as articles , adjectives , etc. The complement is sometimes called the object of the adposition. The resulting phrase , formed by the adposition together with its complement, is called an adpositional phrase or prepositional phrase (PP) (or for specificity, a postpositional or circumpositional phrase). An adposition establishes

1064-446: A particular direction ("Kay went to the store"), the direction in which something leads or points ("A path into the woods"), or the extent of something ("The fog stretched from London to Paris"). A static meaning indicates only a location (" at the store", " behind the chair", " on the moon"). Some prepositions can have both uses: "he sat in the water" (static); "he jumped in the water" (probably directional). In some languages,

1140-410: A postpositional phrase. Examples include: Some adpositions can appear either before or after their complement: An adposition like the above, which can be either a preposition or a postposition, can be called an ambiposition . However, ambiposition may also be used to refer to a circumposition (see below), or to a word that appears to function as a preposition and postposition simultaneously, as in

1216-467: A preposition (Latin: praepositio ) stand before the word it governs (go the fools among (Sh[akespeare]); What are you laughing at ?). You might just as well believe that all blackguards are black or that turkeys come from Turkey; many names have either been chosen unfortunately at first or have changed their meanings in the course of time." Simple adpositions consist of a single word ( on , in , for , towards , etc.). Complex adpositions consist of

1292-409: A prepositional phrase headed by cóng ("from"), taking the locative noun phrase bīngxīang lǐ ("refrigerator inside") as its complement. An inposition is a rare type of adposition that appears between parts of a complex complement. For example, in the native Californian Timbisha language , the phrase "from a mean cold" can be translated using the word order "cold from mean"—the inposition follows

1368-560: A pronominal object to form inflected prepositions . The following properties are characteristic of most adpositional systems: As noted above, adpositions are referred to by various terms, depending on their position relative to the complement. While the term preposition sometimes denotes any adposition, its stricter meaning refers only to one that precedes its complement. Examples of this, from English, have been given above; similar examples can be found in many European and other languages, for example: In certain grammatical constructions,

1444-452: A result, there exist several systems to classify the Turkic languages. The modern genetic classification schemes for Turkic are still largely indebted to Samoilovich (1922). The Turkic languages may be divided into six branches: In this classification, Oghur Turkic is also referred to as Lir-Turkic, and the other branches are subsumed under the title of Shaz-Turkic or Common Turkic . It

1520-463: Is a common characteristic of major language families spoken in Inner Eurasia ( Mongolic , Tungusic , Uralic and Turkic), the type of harmony found in them differs from each other, specifically, Uralic and Turkic have a shared type of vowel harmony (called palatal vowel harmony ) whereas Mongolic and Tungusic represent a different type. The homeland of the Turkic peoples and their language

1596-651: Is a forty per cent abridgement realised with reduced-length entries and the omission of about half the entries of the 1996 edition. A second edition of Allen's "Pocket Fowler" was published in 2008, the content of which the publisher said "harks back to the original 1926 edition". Preposition Adpositions are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations ( in, under, towards, behind, ago , etc.) or mark various semantic roles ( of, for ). The most common adpositions are prepositions (which precede their complement) and postpositions (which follow their complement). An adposition typically combines with

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1672-532: Is a tendency for languages that feature postpositions also to have other head-final features, such as verbs that follow their objects ; and for languages that feature prepositions to have other head-initial features, such as verbs that precede their objects . This is only a tendency, however; an example of a language that behaves differently is Latin , which employs mostly prepositions, even though it typically places verbs after their objects. A circumposition consists of two or more parts, positioned on both sides of

1748-528: Is also found in some Niger–Congo languages such as Vata and Gbadi, and in some North American varieties of French . Some prescriptive English grammars teach that prepositions cannot end a sentence, although there is no rule prohibiting that use. Similar rules arose during the rise of classicism, when they were applied to English in imitation of classical languages such as Latin. Otto Jespersen , in his Essentials of English Grammar (first published 1933), commented on this definition-derived rule: "...nor need

1824-529: Is called improper if it is some other part of speech being used in the same way as a preposition. Examples of simple and complex prepositions that have been so classified include prima di ("before") and davanti (a) ("in front of") in Italian , and ergo ("on account of") and causa ("for the sake of") in Latin . In reference to Ancient Greek , however, an improper preposition is one that cannot also serve as

1900-443: Is currently regarded as one of the world's primary language families . Turkic is one of the main members of the controversial Altaic language family , but Altaic currently lacks support from a majority of linguists. None of the theories linking Turkic languages to other families have a wide degree of acceptance at present. Shared features with languages grouped together as Altaic have been interpreted by most mainstream linguists to be

1976-455: Is going into her bedroom", but not *"Jay is lying down into her bedroom"). Directional meanings can be further divided into telic and atelic . Telic prepositional phrases imply movement all the way to the endpoint ("she ran to the fence"), while atelic ones do not ("she ran towards the fence"). Static meanings can be divided into projective and non-projective , where projective meanings are those whose understanding requires knowledge of

2052-414: Is more commonly assumed, however, that Sammy and the following predicate forms a small clause , which then becomes the single complement of the preposition. (In the first example, a word such as as may be considered to have been elided , which, if present, would clarify the grammatical relationship.) Adpositions can be used to express a wide range of semantic relations between their complement and

2128-582: Is not clear when these two major types of Turkic can be assumed to have diverged. With less certainty, the Southwestern, Northwestern, Southeastern and Oghur groups may further be summarized as West Turkic , the Northeastern, Kyrgyz-Kipchak, and Arghu (Khalaj) groups as East Turkic . Geographically and linguistically, the languages of the Northwestern and Southeastern subgroups belong to

2204-517: Is suggested to be somewhere between the Transcaspian steppe and Northeastern Asia ( Manchuria ), with genetic evidence pointing to the region near South Siberia and Mongolia as the "Inner Asian Homeland" of the Turkic ethnicity. Similarly several linguists, including Juha Janhunen , Roger Blench and Matthew Spriggs, suggest that modern-day Mongolia is the homeland of the early Turkic language. Relying on Proto-Turkic lexical items about

2280-411: Is the least harmonic or not harmonic at all. Taking into account the documented historico-linguistic development of Turkic languages overall, both inscriptional and textual, the family provides over one millennium of documented stages as well as scenarios in the linguistic evolution of vowel harmony which, in turn, demonstrates harmony evolution along a confidently definable trajectory Though vowel harmony

2356-604: Is widely rejected by historical linguists. Similarities with the Uralic languages even caused these families to be regarded as one for a long time under the Ural-Altaic hypothesis. However, there has not been sufficient evidence to conclude the existence of either of these macrofamilies. The shared characteristics between the languages are attributed presently to extensive prehistoric language contact . Turkic languages are null-subject languages , have vowel harmony (with

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2432-415: The ğ in dağ and dağlı is not realized as a consonant, but as a slight lengthening of the preceding vowel. The following table is based mainly upon the classification scheme presented by Lars Johanson . [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] The following is a brief comparison of cognates among the basic vocabulary across

2508-606: The Catholic missionaries sent to the Western Cumans inhabiting a region corresponding to present-day Hungary and Romania . The earliest records of the language spoken by Volga Bulgars , debatably the parent or a distant relative of Chuvash language , are dated to the 13th–14th centuries AD. With the Turkic expansion during the Early Middle Ages (c. 6th–11th centuries AD), Turkic languages, in

2584-559: The Chuvash language from other Turkic languages. According to him, the Chuvash language does not share certain common characteristics with Turkic languages to such a degree that some scholars consider it an independent Chuvash family similar to Uralic and Turkic languages. Turkic classification of Chuvash was seen as a compromise solution for the classification purposes. Some lexical and extensive typological similarities between Turkic and

2660-554: The Vedic Sanskrit construction (noun-1) ā (noun-2), meaning "from (noun-1) to (noun-2)". Whether a language has primarily prepositions or postpositions is seen as an aspect of its typological classification, and tends to correlate with other properties related to head directionality . Since an adposition is regarded as the head of its phrase, prepositional phrases are head-initial (or right- branching ), while postpositional phrases are head-final (or left-branching). There

2736-539: The case of the complement varies depending on the meaning, as with several prepositions in German , such as in : In English and many other languages, prepositional phrases with static meaning are commonly used as predicative expressions after a copula ("Bob is at the store"); this may happen with some directional prepositions as well ("Bob is from Australia"), but this is less common. Directional prepositional phrases combine mostly with verbs that indicate movement ("Jay

2812-471: The " Turco-Mongol " tradition. The two groups shared a similar religion system, Tengrism , and there exists a multitude of evident loanwords between Turkic languages and Mongolic languages . Although the loans were bidirectional, today Turkic loanwords constitute the largest foreign component in Mongolian vocabulary. Italian historian and philologist Igor de Rachewiltz noted a significant distinction of

2888-483: The 1996 edition was published as Fowler's Modern English Usage . The fourth edition, Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage , was published in 2015, edited by Jeremy Butterfield. The modernisation of A Dictionary of English Usage (1926) yielded the Pocket Fowler's Modern English Usage (1999), edited by the lexicographer Robert Allen , which is based upon Burchfield's 1996 edition; the modernised edition

2964-517: The Indo-European languages this phenomenon is mostly confined to the Celtic languages like Welsh and Irish . Polish also allows some degree of combining prepositions with pronouns in the third person. The majority of Welsh prepositions can be inflected. This is achieved by having a preposition such as o ( ' of/from ' ) + a linking element; in the case of o this is -hon- +

3040-478: The Latin prefix ad- , meaning "to"). However, some linguists prefer to use the well-known and longer-established term preposition in place of adposition , irrespective of position relative to the complement. An adposition typically combines with exactly one complement , most often a noun phrase (or, in a different analysis, a determiner phrase ). In English, this is generally a noun (or something functioning as

3116-453: The Turkic family. There is a high degree of mutual intelligibility , upon moderate exposure, among the various Oghuz languages , which include Turkish , Azerbaijani , Turkmen , Qashqai , Chaharmahali Turkic , Gagauz , and Balkan Gagauz Turkish , as well as Oghuz-influenced Crimean Tatar . Other Turkic languages demonstrate varying amounts of mutual intelligibility within their subgroups as well. Although methods of classification vary,

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3192-442: The Turkic language family (about 60 words). Despite being cognates, some of the words may denote a different meaning. Empty cells do not necessarily imply that a particular language is lacking a word to describe the concept, but rather that the word for the concept in that language may be formed from another stem and is not cognate with the other words in the row or that a loanword is used in its place. Also, there may be shifts in

3268-496: The Turkic languages are usually considered to be divided into two branches: Oghur , of which the only surviving member is Chuvash , and Common Turkic , which includes all other Turkic languages. Turkic languages show many similarities with the Mongolic , Tungusic , Koreanic , and Japonic languages. These similarities have led some linguists (including Talât Tekin ) to propose an Altaic language family , though this proposal

3344-593: The West. (See picture in the box on the right above.) For centuries, the Turkic-speaking peoples have migrated extensively and intermingled continuously, and their languages have been influenced mutually and through contact with the surrounding languages, especially the Iranian , Slavic , and Mongolic languages . This has obscured the historical developments within each language and/or language group, and as

3420-438: The assimilated pronoun element, resulting in ohon- being the preposition's "stem" form. It is common in speech for the pronoun to be present after the preposition, but it can be omitted. Unless used with a pronoun the form is always o and not the "stem", e.g. dw i'n dod o Gymru – ' I come from Wales ' , gormod o gwrw – ' too much ( of ) beer ' . Turkic languages The Turkic languages are

3496-433: The central Turkic languages, while the Northeastern and Khalaj languages are the so-called peripheral languages. Hruschka, et al. (2014) use computational phylogenetic methods to calculate a tree of Turkic based on phonological sound changes . The following isoglosses are traditionally used in the classification of the Turkic languages: Additional isoglosses include: *In the standard Istanbul dialect of Turkish,

3572-532: The choice of adposition may be determined by another element in the construction or be fixed by the construction as a whole. Here the adposition may have little independent semantic content of its own, and there may be no clear reason why the particular adposition is used rather than another. Examples of such expressions are: Prepositions sometimes mark roles that may be considered largely grammatical: Spatial meanings of adpositions may be either directional or static . A directional meaning usually involves motion in

3648-584: The climate, topography, flora, fauna, people's modes of subsistence, Turkologist Peter Benjamin Golden locates the Proto-Turkic Urheimat in the southern, taiga-steppe zone of the Sayan - Altay region. Extensive contact took place between Proto-Turks and Proto-Mongols approximately during the first millennium BC; the shared cultural tradition between the two Eurasian nomadic groups is called

3724-407: The complement of a preposition may be absent or may be moved from its position directly following the preposition. This may be referred to as preposition stranding (see also below ), as in "Whom did you go with ?" and "There's only one thing worse than being talked about ." There are also some (mainly colloquial) expressions in which a preposition's complement may be omitted, such as "I'm going to

3800-484: The complement. Circumpositions are very common in Pashto and Kurdish . The following are examples from Northern Kurdish (Kurmanji): Various constructions in other languages might also be analyzed as circumpositional, for example: Most such phrases, however, can be analyzed as having a different hierarchical structure (such as a prepositional phrase modifying a following adverb). The Chinese example could be analyzed as

3876-780: The complement. Other terms sometimes used for particular types of adposition include ambiposition , inposition and interposition . Some linguists use the word preposition in place of adposition regardless of the applicable word order. The word preposition comes from Latin : prae- prefix (pre- prefix) ("before") and Latin : ponere ("to put"). This refers to the situation in Latin and Greek (and in English ), where such words are placed before their complement (except sometimes in Ancient Greek), and are hence "pre-positioned". In some languages, including Sindhi , Hindustani , Turkish , Hungarian , Korean , and Japanese ,

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3952-612: The course of just a few centuries, spread across Central Asia , from Siberia to the Mediterranean . Various terminologies from the Turkic languages have passed into Persian , Urdu , Ukrainian , Russian , Chinese , Mongolian , Hungarian and to a lesser extent, Arabic . The geographical distribution of Turkic-speaking peoples across Eurasia since the Ottoman era ranges from the North-East of Siberia to Turkey in

4028-415: The disadvantage of"), zulasten/zu Lasten ("at the expense of"). The distinction between complex adpositions and free combinations of words is not a black-and-white issue: complex adpositions (in English, "prepositional idioms") can be more fossilized or less fossilized. In English, this applies to a number of structures of the form "preposition + (article) + noun + preposition", such as in front of , for

4104-403: The early Turkic language. According to him, words related to nature, earth and ruling but especially to the sky and stars seem to be cognates. The linguist Choi suggested already in 1996 a close relationship between Turkic and Korean regardless of any Altaic connections: In addition, the fact that the morphological elements are not easily borrowed between languages, added to the fact that

4180-591: The family. The Compendium is the first comprehensive dictionary of the Turkic languages and also includes the first known map of the Turkic speakers' geographical distribution. It mainly pertains to the Southwestern branch of the family. The Codex Cumanicus (12th–13th centuries AD) concerning the Northwestern branch is another early linguistic manual, between the Kipchak language and Latin , used by

4256-605: The first millennium. They are characterized as a dialect continuum . Turkic languages are spoken by some 200 million people. The Turkic language with the greatest number of speakers is Turkish , spoken mainly in Anatolia and the Balkans ; its native speakers account for about 38% of all Turkic speakers, followed by Uzbek . Characteristic features such as vowel harmony , agglutination , subject-object-verb order, and lack of grammatical gender , are almost universal within

4332-425: The grammatical or semantic relationship of that phrase to the verb in the containing clause. Some examples of the use of English prepositions are given below. In each case, the prepositional phrase appears in italics , the preposition within it appears in bold , and the preposition's complement is underlined . As demonstrated in some of the examples, more than one prepositional phrase may act as an adjunct to

4408-975: The meaning from one language to another, and so the "Common meaning" given is only approximate. In some cases, the form given is found only in some dialects of the language, or a loanword is much more common (e.g. in Turkish, the preferred word for "fire" is the Persian-derived ateş , whereas the native od is dead). Forms are given in native Latin orthographies unless otherwise noted. (to press with one's knees) Azerbaijani "ǝ" and "ä": IPA /æ/ Azerbaijani "q": IPA /g/, word-final "q": IPA /x/ Turkish and Azerbaijani "ı", Karakhanid "ɨ", Turkmen "y", and Sakha "ï": IPA /ɯ/ Turkmen "ň", Karakhanid "ŋ": IPA /ŋ/ Turkish and Azerbaijani "y",Turkmen "ý" and "j" in other languages: IPA /j/ All "ş" and "š" letters: IPA /ʃ/ All "ç" and "č" letters: IPA /t͡ʃ/ Kyrgyz "c": IPA /d͡ʒ/ Kazakh "j": IPA /ʒ/ The Turkic language family

4484-467: The meaning of the English preposition of is expressed in many languages by a genitive case ending), but adpositions are classed as syntactic elements, while case markings are morphological . Adpositions themselves are usually non-inflecting ("invariant"): they do not have paradigms of the form (such as tense, case, gender, etc.) the same way that verbs, adjectives, and nouns can. There are exceptions, though, such as prepositions that have fused with

4560-967: The nearby Tungusic and Mongolic families, as well as the Korean and Japonic families has in more recent years been instead attributed to prehistoric contact amongst the group, sometimes referred to as the Northeast Asian sprachbund . A more recent (circa first millennium BC) contact between "core Altaic" (Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic) is distinguished from this, due to the existence of definitive common words that appear to have been mostly borrowed from Turkic into Mongolic, and later from Mongolic into Tungusic, as Turkic borrowings into Mongolic significantly outnumber Mongolic borrowings into Turkic, and Turkic and Tungusic do not share any words that do not also exist in Mongolic. Turkic languages also show some Chinese loanwords that point to early contact during

4636-434: The notable exception of Uzbek due to strong Persian-Tajik influence), converbs , extensive agglutination by means of suffixes and postpositions , and lack of grammatical articles , noun classes , and grammatical gender . Subject–object–verb word order is universal within the family. In terms of the level of vowel harmony in the Turkic language family, Tuvan is characterized as almost fully harmonic whereas Uzbek

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4712-446: The noun but precedes any following modifiers that form part of the same noun phrase . The Latin word cum is also commonly used as an inposition, as in the phrase summa cum laude , meaning "with highest praise", lit. "highest with praise". The term interposition has been used for adpositions in structures such as word for word , French coup sur coup ("one after another, repeatedly"), and Russian друг с другом ("one with

4788-422: The other"). This is not a case of an adposition appearing inside its complement, as the two nouns do not form a single phrase (there is no phrase * word word , for example); such uses have more of a coordinating character. Preposition stranding is a syntactic construct in which a preposition occurs somewhere other than immediately before its complement. For example, in the English sentence "What did you sit on?"

4864-463: The park. Do you want to come with [me]?", and the French Il fait trop froid, je ne suis pas habillée pour ("It's too cold, I'm not dressed for [the situation].") The bolded words in these examples are generally still considered prepositions because when they form a phrase with a complement (in more ordinary constructions) they must appear first. A postposition follows its complement to form

4940-578: The perspective or point of view. For example, the meaning of "behind the rock" is likely to depend on the position of the speaker (projective), whereas the meaning of "on the desk" is not (non-projective). Sometimes the interpretation is ambiguous, as in "behind the house," which may mean either at the natural back of the house or on the opposite side of the house from the speaker. Some languages feature inflected adpositions—adpositions (usually prepositions) marked for grammatical person and/or grammatical number to give meanings such as "on me," "from you," etc. In

5016-430: The preposition on has what as its complement, but what is moved to the start of the sentence, because it is an interrogative word . This sentence is much more common and natural than the equivalent sentence without stranding: "On what did you sit?" Preposition stranding is commonly found in English , as well as North Germanic languages such as Swedish . Its existence in German is debated. Preposition stranding

5092-464: The rest of the context. The relations expressed may be spatial (denoting location or direction), temporal (denoting position in time), or relations expressing comparison, content, agent, instrument, means, manner, cause, purpose, reference, etc. Most common adpositions are highly polysemous (they have various different meanings). In many cases, a primary, spatial meaning becomes extended to non-spatial uses by metaphorical or other processes. Because of

5168-522: The result of a sprachbund . The possibility of a genetic relation between Turkic and Korean , independently from Altaic, is suggested by some linguists. The linguist Kabak (2004) of the University of Würzburg states that Turkic and Korean share similar phonology as well as morphology . Li Yong-Sŏng (2014) suggest that there are several cognates between Turkic and Old Korean . He states that these supposed cognates can be useful to reconstruct

5244-756: The sake of . The following characteristics are good indications that a given combination is "frozen" enough to be considered a complex preposition in English: Marginal prepositions are prepositions that have affinities with other word classes, most notably participles. Marginal prepositions behave like prepositions but derive from other parts of speech. Some marginal prepositions in English include barring , concerning , considering , excluding , failing , following , including , notwithstanding , regarding , and respecting . In descriptions of some languages, prepositions are divided into proper (or essential ) and improper (or accidental ). A preposition

5320-578: The same kinds of words typically come after their complement. To indicate this, they are called postpositions (using the prefix post- , from Latin post meaning "behind, after"). There are also some cases where the function is performed by two parts coming before and after the complement; this is called a circumposition (from Latin circum- prefix "around"). In some languages, for example Finnish , some adpositions can be used as both prepositions and postpositions. Prepositions, postpositions and circumpositions are collectively known as adpositions (using

5396-517: The same word. In the last of these examples the complement has the form of an adverb, which has been nominalised to serve as a noun phrase; see Different forms of complement , below. Prepositional phrases themselves are sometimes nominalized: An adposition may determine the grammatical case of its complement. In English, the complements of prepositions take the objective case where available ( from him , not * from he ). In Koine Greek , for example, certain prepositions always take their objects in

5472-819: The time of Proto-Turkic . The first established records of the Turkic languages are the eighth century AD Orkhon inscriptions by the Göktürks , recording the Old Turkic language, which were discovered in 1889 in the Orkhon Valley in Mongolia. The Compendium of the Turkic Dialects ( Divânü Lügati't-Türk ), written during the 11th century AD by Kaşgarlı Mahmud of the Kara-Khanid Khanate , constitutes an early linguistic treatment of

5548-452: The transitional stages, the adposition acts in some ways like a single word, and in other ways like a multi-word unit. For example, current German orthographic conventions recognize the indeterminate status of certain prepositions, allowing two spellings: anstelle / an Stelle ("instead of"), aufgrund / auf Grund ("because of"), mithilfe / mit Hilfe ("by means of"), zugunsten / zu Gunsten ("in favor of"), zuungunsten / zu Ungunsten ("to

5624-416: The variety of meanings, a single adposition often has many possible equivalents in another language, depending on the exact context. This can cause difficulties in foreign language learning . Usage can also vary between dialects of the same language (for example, American English has on the weekend , whereas British English uses at the weekend ). In some contexts (as in the case of some phrasal verbs )

5700-522: The writer away from illogical sentence construction, and the misuse of words. In the entries "Pedantic Humour" and "Polysyllabic Humour" Fowler mocked the use of arcane words (archaisms) and the use of unnecessarily long words. Widely and often cited, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage is renowned for its witty passages, such as: Before writing A Dictionary of Modern English Usage , Henry W. Fowler and his younger brother, Francis George Fowler (1871–1918), wrote and revised The King's English (1906),

5776-439: Was published in 1926, and then was reprinted with corrections in 1930, 1937, 1954, and in 2009, with an introduction and commentary by the linguist David Crystal . The second edition, titled Fowler's Modern English Usage , was published in 1965, revised and edited by Ernest Gowers . The third edition, The New Fowler's Modern English Usage , was published in 1996, edited by Robert Burchfield ; and in 2004, Burchfield's revision of

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