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Inflected preposition

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In some languages, an inflected preposition, or conjugated preposition, is a word formed from the contraction of a preposition with a personal pronoun. For instance, in Scottish Gaelic, to say "before him," one would not say ro e, but roimhe, an amalgamation of the two words. Conjugated prepositions are commonly reanalysed as inflected words by native speakers and by traditional grammar.

Inflected prepositions are found in the Insular Celtic languages (including Scottish Gaelic, Irish, Welsh, and Breton) and in many Semitic languages including Hebrew (לי "to me")[1] and Arabic.

Languages that do not have full paradigms of inflected prepositions may allow contraction of prepositions and pronouns to a more limited extent. In Polish, for instance, a handful of common prepositions allow amalgamated forms (in formal registers) with 3rd person pronouns: na niego ("on him/it") → nań.[2] However, these contracted forms are very archaic and rarely heard in daily speech.

The term prepositional pronoun is also used sometimes for inflected preposition, but this may cause confusion with another sense of this expression. (See prepositional pronoun.)

Examples

In Spanish inflected prepositions can be found in the forms conmigo[1] (with me), contigo (with you, singular), consigo (with him/her/itself) [2].

In Portuguese inflected prepositions can be found in the forms comigo (with me), contigo (with you, singular), consigo (with him/her/itself), conosco/connosco (with us), and convosco (with you, plural).

In German inflected prepositions occur in Ruhrdeutsch. [3]

References

  1. ^ Glinert, Lewis. Modern Hebrew: An Essential Grammar (2nd edition ed.). Routledge UK. pp. 41–44. ISBN 0-415-10190-5. {{cite book}}: |edition= has extra text (help)
  2. ^ Swan, Oscar E. (2002). A Grammar of Contemporary Polish. Bloomington, IN: Slavica. ISBN 0-89357-296-9.
  3. ^ "The Phonology and Morphology of Function Word Contractions in German". Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics, 9. 2006. doi:10.1007/s10828-005-4533-8. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |authors= ignored (help)

See also

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