We explain what prepositions are, what types exist and examples in a text. Also, the official list of prepositions.
What are the prepositions?
Prepositions are a certain invariable type of words, of entirely grammatical meaning, whose function within the sentence is to express the relationship that exists between two or more other terms. Therefore, they are words that do not have their own lexical meaning, but rather express a logical, spatial, positional or some other kind of relationship. For this reason, they are usually the most arbitrary and difficult to learn particles of a language.
In fact, prepositions are usually quite ambiguous in their use, and even native speakers can use them incorrectly or have questions about which one is appropriate for a specific situation, since several prepositions can have similar uses.
This is the case, to cite an example, of the word "from", which generally expresses a relationship of belonging ("That's Juan's dog"), but can also express provenance ("I'm from Mexico"), content ( "A glass of water") or even manufacturing material ("A titanium bar").
Prepositions are numerous in Spanish and in most of the Languages, and are usually subject to very specific rules of the grammar. Some come from Latin and other extinct languages, while others are the result of neologisms, and some even tend to disappear, being replaced by others.
Similarly, there are verbs and phrases that require specific prepositions (in what is called prepositional regime); and it may also be the case that some prepositions contract when joining certain articles, as with “of”(Of + the) or with“to the”(To + him).
Types of prepositions
Prepositions can be classified according to the relational meaning they contribute to the sentence, that is, according to the type of relationship that their presence establishes, although many times this is not exact, is ambiguous or belongs to several categories at the same time. Thus, we have:
- Prepositions of place, which indicate a physical, geographical or spatial state of one thing with respect to another, such as: from, towards, via, over, between, to, under, together, etc.
- Prepositions of time, which express a relationship of anteriority, posteriority or simultaneity with respect to something else, such as: with, until, during, after, from, etc.
- Prepositions of mode, which indicate the way in which an action was carried out, such as: a, with, in, by, under, according to, and so on.
- Prepositions of cause-consequence, which establish a type of causal or consequential relationship, such as: for, for, to, according to, and so on.
- Prepositions of instrumentality, which indicate with what an action was carried out, such as: with, from, in, by, through, and so on.
- Opposing prepositions, which express a relationship of opposition or opposition, such as: against, versus, front, ectétera.
- Prepositions of absence, which denote lack, deprivation or absence of something, such as: without.
On the other hand, there are simple prepositions, like many of those listed here, which contain a single term, and compound prepositions, which involve several terms in the same expression, such as: above, between, along with, despite, in order to, and so on.
Prepositions in a text
As an example of use, in the following text we have highlighted the prepositions of each sentence (taken from "The most beautiful drowned man in the world", by Gabriel García Márquez):
The first children to see the stealthy dark promontory approaching from the sea, they had the illusion that it was an enemy ship. Later they saw that it had no flags or trees, and they thought it was a whale. But when he was stranded on the beach they removed the sargasso thickets, the filaments of jellyfish and the remains of schools and shipwrecks that he carried, and only then did they discover that he was a drowned man.
They had played with it all afternoon, burying it and digging it up in the sand, when someone happened to spot them and sounded the alarm in the village. The men who carried him to the nearest house noticed that he weighed more than all the known dead, almost as much as a horse, and they told themselves that perhaps he had been adrift too long and the water had gotten into his bones. . When they laid it on the ground they saw that it had been much larger than all men, since it barely fit in the house, but they thought that perhaps the ability to continue growing after death was in the nature of certain drowned people. It had the smell of the sea, and only the shape allowed one to suppose that it was the corpse of a human being, because its skin was covered with a shell of remora and mud.
They didn't have to wipe his face to know that he was someone else's dead. The town had only about twenty plank houses, with stone patios without flowers, scattered at the end of a desert headland. The land was so scarce that mothers always walked in fear that the wind would carry their children away, and the dead that the years caused them had to be thrown on the cliffs.
List of prepositions
The “official” list of simple prepositions established by the Royal Spanish Academy includes the following: to, before, under, fits, with, against, from, from, during, in, between, towards, to, through, for, by, according to, without, so, on, after, versus and via.
In addition, a very extensive set of prepositional phrases is recognized, among which are: about, next to, around, before, despite, near, according to, in order to, provided, provided, under, in front of, within, after, behind, above, as to, in front of, in order to, after, under, in front of, outside of, thanks to, at the mercy of, next to, far from, because of, with respect to, and so on.