영어 전치사의 확장

Abstract

This paper proposes an extended definition of English prepositions within the theoretical framework of Huddleston & Pullum (2002). It is generally agreed that English prepositions take nouns or noun phrases as their complements. As a result, the complements play an important role in defining English prepositions. English prepositions, however, can take other phrases as complements including adjectival, adverbial, or prepositional phrases or clauses. They can also be used without any complements, as demonstrated by the existence of 'intransitive prepositions'. These observations suggest the need for a more comprehensive definition of English prepositions. The extended definition proposed in this paper has several advantages. First, lexical items that have traditionally fallen into several categories of an adverb, a particle, a conjunction or a preposition can be unified into one category: preposition. Second, the extension of English prepositions also has the benefit in providing more explicit definitions and descriptions of adverbs and subordinate conjunctions. With the extended definition of prepositions, it is also possible to give clear grammatical explanations to the use of right as a modifier before a preposition and the phenomenon in which the verb be can take as its complement a prepositional phrase but not an adverb.