Brett,
The page you direct us to was just changed last month to define a preposition by its semantics. This current definition seems to have the advantage of going across many languages, but it ignores the syntactic patterning that is traditionally at the heart of the part-of-speech definition. For example, many of the adverbs listed do not take objects (complements), unless their morphological structure is taken to be part of the "syntactic" definition. Maybe this "simple wiktionary" chooses not to pay attention to traditional syntax because of its multiple language stance. Are there any philosophical guidelines there?
Bruce
-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Brett Reynolds
Sent: Monday, April 12, 2010 4:57 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Prepositions
Importance: Low
On 2010-04-11, at 11:10 PM, Herb wrote:
> The preposition system of Old, Middle, and Early Modern English was pretty simple. Since 1700, however, our inventory of prepositions has mushroomed by perhaps a factor of eight, and choice of preposition is one of the hardest aspects of English for non-native speakers to master.
I'm curious to know what you include in the category of preposition. I'm pretty comfortable with the idea the most of the traditional "subordinating conjunctions" are actually prepositions with clausal complements and that many words traditionally analyzed as adverbs are also prepositions. I'd include in the category everything listed here:
<http://simple.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Prepositions>
You?
Best,
Brett
-----------------------
Brett Reynolds
English Language Centre
Humber College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
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