A prepositional pronoun is a special form of a
personal pronoun
Personal pronouns are pronouns that are associated primarily with a particular grammatical person – first person (as ''I''), second person (as ''you''), or third person (as ''he'', ''she'', ''it'', ''they''). Personal pronouns may also take dif ...
that is used as the object of a
preposition
Prepositions and postpositions, together called adpositions (or broadly, in traditional grammar, simply prepositions), are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations (''in'', ''under'', ''towards'', ''before'') or mark various ...
.
English
English usually refers to:
* English language
* English people
English may also refer to:
Peoples, culture, and language
* ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England
** English national ...
does not have a distinct
grammatical case
A grammatical case is a category of nouns and noun modifiers ( determiners, adjectives, participles, and numerals), which corresponds to one or more potential grammatical functions for a nominal group in a wording. In various languages, nomin ...
that relates solely to prepositional pronouns. Certain genitive pronouns
Genitive pronouns
/ref> (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 pronoun
In linguistics, an object pronoun is a personal pronoun that is used typically as a grammatical object: the direct or indirect object of a verb, or the object of a preposition. Object pronouns contrast with subject pronouns. Object pronouns in E ...
s (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
The Romance languages, sometimes referred to as Latin languages or Neo-Latin languages, are the various modern languages that evolved from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic languages in the Indo-European language ...
, prepositions combine with stressed pronominal forms that are distinct from the unstressed clitic
In morphology and syntax, a clitic (, backformed from Greek "leaning" or "enclitic"Crystal, David. ''A First Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics''. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1980. Print.) is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a ...
pronouns used with verbs. In French, prepositions combine with disjunctive pronoun
A disjunctive pronoun is a stressed form of a personal pronoun reserved for use in isolation or in certain syntactic contexts.
Examples and usage
Disjunctive pronominal forms are typically found in the following contexts. The examples are taken f ...
s, 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
The Slavic languages, also known as the Slavonic languages, are Indo-European languages spoken primarily by the Slavic peoples and their descendants. They are thought to descend from a proto-language called Proto-Slavic, spoken during the ...
(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:
See also
* Prepositional case
In grammar, the prepositional case (abbreviated ) and the postpositional case (abbreviated ) - generalised as ''adpositional cases'' - are grammatical cases that respectively mark the object of a preposition and a postposition. This term can be us ...
* Portuguese pronouns
* Spanish pronouns
Spanish pronouns in some ways work quite differently from their English counterparts. Subject pronouns are often omitted, and object pronouns come in clitic and non-clitic forms. When used as clitics, object pronouns can appear as proclitics tha ...
* French personal pronouns
French personal pronouns (analogous to English personal pronouns, English ''I'', ''you, he/she, we'', and ''they'') reflect the grammatical person, person and grammatical number, number of their referent, and in the case of the third person, its g ...
References
Personal pronouns of Portuguese at Orbis Latinus
(an overview)
External links
{{lexical categories, state=collapsed
Personal pronouns