Prepositions

My Head is almost full of new terms and expressings, besides being filled up with all the things I have to remember for the exams. I have tree exams in March. Right now I’m focusing on the written exam I have in grammar, because I feel that exam is the hardest one (Might think otherwise when I’m over and done with it). Enough about exams let me tell you about Friday’s grammar lecture in stead. The lecture was about Propositions and prepositional phrases.  I had already read in one of grammar books, which is a descriptive grammar book, that the authors Huddleston and Pullum had decided to expand the category which traditional grammarians classify as prepositions. Traditional grammarians only classify prepositions if they take a noun phrase as a complement. Huddleston and Pullum, on the other hand, that this classification is outdated. So words which traditional was classified as subordination conjunctions, adverbials and adverbs are now included in prepositions. This has a big influence of the groups of subordinators which is only left with 3 words; if, that and whether. 

Maybe I should just add that prepositions talks about relations in time and place, as in these examples:

1)      I haven’t seen her since Easter

2)      I haven’t seen her since she left town

the single underlined + double underlined is the prepositional phrase, the double underlined is the preposition)

Sentence two isn’t in traditional grammar a prepositional phrase, because it isn’t followed by a noun phrase but a clause.