Karl J Sherlock
Associate Professor, English
Email: karl.sherlock@gcccd.edu
Phone: 619-644-7871
English is a living language, and a living language is in flux, always evolving and adapting to how the culture at large or the subcultures within are bending the rules, rejecting former conventions, creating new contexts. As a result, prepositions have sometimes taken on peculiar forms and irregular usage. In this section, we'll look at a few of these:
The following prepositions are perhaps less commonly used because they're reserved for legal and formal communication. We have a “thing” in popular cultural about not wanting language to sound pretentious. Recent generations have become more tone-deaf to elegant foreign usage—nes pas? Some may think several of the following prepositions put on airs because of their Latin and French derivation. (In fact, some of them are actually italicized like foreign words and phrases.) How shall a grammar teacher, per se, respond to such grumbling? How about “Get over it!”
Let's come directly to the point: there is no such thing as a prepositional verb. Rather, these are verbs phrases that look like they contain prepositions. Appearances, though, can deceive.
The closest we come to a true "prepositional verb" is a preposition that takes a gerund or gerund phrase as its object, in effect using an activity to modifying another word in the sentence:
Since gerunds are legitimate nouns, evolved from verbs of every type, we can rest assured that no rule of grammar has been broken here to create a verbal prepositional phrase.
Phrasal verbs, on the other hand, are jerry-built constructions. They're NOT prepositional phrases, but, rather, actions that are paired with directional modifiers.
Even though phrasal verbs sorta, kinda look like prepositions, the word "preposition" doesn't quite fit the bill. After all, a single word that modifies a verb isn't called a preposition; it's called an adverb. Take the word "inside," which we know to be a preposition, an adjective, a noun, and an adverb:
The phrase "went inside" in this sentence is an intransitive verb ("went") modified by an adverb of direction ("inside"). Just about all the directional prepositions have adverbial counterparts that can be used with intransitive verbs in the same manner:
And so on. All of the intransitive verbs in the examples above imply position or direction, and their adverbs reinforce that. However, what happens when we use these same adverbs with other kinds of verbs? Then, the action and its directional modifier combine to create something new, something that's mainly a verb, but is also a modifier: a phrasal verb. This is why we don't refer to their accompanying modifier as a preposition or an adverb. We simply call them "phrasal particles."
Yes,"phrasal particle" does make you think of quantum physics, but in all of the examples above, the word "up" cannot be separated grammatically from its verb, because, ostensibly, it changes the verb's quantum meaning: bulk up; stand up; taken up; tore up; go up against. Obviously,"up" is not the only word that does this:
The phrasal verb "follow through" doesn't mean "follow," much less follow someone or something through another space; it means continuing and completing what has been started. It's difficult to think of a single, precise verb that can capture the sense of this, so, until one is found,"follow through" will work as a placeholder, which is exactly what all good phrasal verbs should do. However, as verbal skills continue to wane and academic institutions continue to take a more and more laissez-faire approach to formal writing, more people are defaulting to phrasal verbs without considering whether a more precise and formal verb already exists. In the vast, vast majority of cases, perfectly good, single verbs already exist to take the place of unnecessary phrasal verbs:
Not... |
But, rather... |
rise up |
rise up arise; uplift; ascend |
get off |
disembark; exit; leave |
tear down |
raze; destroy; dismantle; demolish |
be down with |
approve; agree; support; be like-minded |
Phrasal verbs are decidedly informal, and sometimes outright idiomatic. They may seem innocuous and more comfortable to use in your formal writing, but their very construction forces you to write the rest of your prose in an informal manner, both in usage and in sentence construction. This is something to be aware of—or, this is something of which to be aware.
You've just witnessed one of the delicate problems of over-relying on phrasal verbs. Since the phrasal particle looks like, smells like, and tastes like a preposition, and other prepositions are present in the same clause, they can often interfere with one another.
Is there a way to move the particle to a proper place as a preposition, to make the sentence sound more formal? Nope!
The fault lies with the entire phrasal verb. The sentence needs a single, precise verb so that the phrasal particle won't interfere with anything else in the sentence:
Okay, even one or two of these have some insidious failures of clarity. (Perhaps he should have brought a clarety wine.) However, at least each of these resolves not to use a phrasal verb when a single word will say it as well, if not better. I would compel you, if I could, to strip your own vocabulary of phrasal verbs whenever possible. By expanding your lexicon, you improve your abilities to think and express yourself more deliberately, precisely, and academically.
More info about Phrasal Verbs, including how to diagram them, is available elsewhere on this site, but you can learn more about their inherent problem of tone in the companion site, Usage and Tone, under "Shortcuts and Diction."
I'm somewhat a collector of vintage lamps from the early twentieth century. I have a love for spelter and ormalu, and the unexpected transformation of a room that occurs when an incandescent bulb radiates through the panels of colored glass. Yet, the lamp remains an autonomously beautiful and delicate work of art, itself. Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley once wrote,"Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, / Stains the white radiance of Eternity." Color me old-fashioned if you like, but what a stained glass window in a cathedral does for many people, a good Kimberly and Duffner lamp does for me at home. During World War II, however, we lost many, many thousands of the most stunningly beautiful and complex stained glass lamps imaginable, to jingoism! Owner after owner used ball peen hammer to smash the lamps to smithereens. The U.S. Military had begun a “lead shortage” propaganda campaign, and folk on the home front with a trusting nature showed their support for loved ones away on the front lines of Europe, the Pacific and North Africa, by rallying to salvage lead out of anything, including the metalwork holding together all those implacably fused, gloriously beautiful pieces of colored glass. The lead extracted wasn't even weapons grade, and much of the metal collected from this campaign was simply dumped into landfills. What a tragic sacrifice of transcendent beauty—a lamp's artistry, craftsmanship, and synergistic splendor cheaply downgraded to the value of its meager lead.
Okay, why this grandfatherly little anecdote? Because grammarians are on an equally misleading and misguided campaign to get us to scrap certain present participles for the sake of adapting them into prepositions. No, I'm not “off my meds.” I'm simply a conscientious objector. Read on.
Lest you've forgotten, present participles are -ing verbals that behave like adjectives: “A running joke” or “An engaging topic.” A participle can form a participial phrase, all of which serves to modify some noun or noun-like work in the sentence: “Genuinely enjoying their conversation, they kept talking till morning.” Because participles form from verbs, they can be modified in exactly the same way verbs can, and they can take objects and complements the way different verb types can. (Hey, they're verbals after all!) Prepositions cannot. True, prepositions do take objects; however, you can't modify a preposition the way you can a participle. It's solid-state. If you use an adverb with a preposition, it means the whole prepositional phrase is modified by it, not just the preposition: If somebody asks, you don't say, for example,"I'm finally at.” That doesn't mean anything. You say,"I'm finally at school”; the whole phrase is modified. However, with a participial phrase, the participle is open to modification: “Fully including your current debts," where the adverb “fully” modifies the participle “including," not the entire phrase.
“Post-Positive” is a way of describing modifiers that come after their subjects: “a love supreme” or “a life less ordinary” instead of “a supreme love” or “a less ordinary life.” The post-positive arrangement is ordinarily used for an elevated or literary style, which explains why it shows up more often in idioms instead of everyday usage. The post-positive frequently turns to past participles for its trick (e.g.,"the people united” or “paradise lost”), but participial phrases frequently can put the participle in a position after their objects, in effect creating a hybrid participial and appositive phrase. Instead of
you could move the participle “fumbling” after its object “keys”:
Guess what? Some of the so-called participial prepositions are capable of post-positive arrangement, something you post-positively cannot do with real prepositions. The word “notwithstanding” falls into this category:
Archaic literary prepositions such as “withal” being the rare exception, prepositions generally take a fixed position at the beginning of the phrase; this is why they're called,"prepositions": "pre" + "position," meaning "the place in front of." They aren't really capable of post-positive rearrangement: “For his charm and intelligence, I married him, faults and all," but not "His charm and intelligence for, I married him, faults and all.” I take this as reasonable proof that something's amiss with the concept of a participial preposition.
Another reason I feel strongly that present participial prepositions are prepositions of convenience only, is that the nouns these participles would otherwise modify are dropped from the sentence, victims of passive constructions or of the many vagaries of contemporary usage. Take, for example, the sentence,"Excluding the Justice of the Peace, just your cousin and my best friend will be there to witness our ceremony.” The supposed preposition,"excluding," is really the start of a participial phrase that should modify the subject of an actively constructed main clause:
In this version of the sentence,"I” can be described as engaged in the act of excluding the Justice of the Peace in the calculations. This jury-rigged preposition could also be the gerund subject of the sentence:
And, we can't overlook this version:
These last couple of versions get to the heart of it. “Excluding” in its participle form is on loan to us from the verb “exclude," but myriad other forms of the same verb can express the same idea without it being a preposition. It's only a preposition if we ignore the fact that certain parts of speech are absent. I think we would no more make this a preposition than if we were to convert the word “excluding” to its intended phrase,"exclusive of” or “exclusive to” (which are simply adjectives followed by the beginnings of an adverbial prepositional phrase).
In fact, if you want to change the present participle form to past participle form, you've got to add other parts of speech that force you to own up to the truth: you're really dealing with a dangling modifier, not a participial preposition:
In light of this, the participial preposition seems a campaign of convenience—a way to give the inadequacies of passive construction and colloquial English an air of legitimacy and function. However, there's no beauty there. The delicate modifying function of the participial has been sacrificed for the crude, utilitarian role of the preposition, like stained glass converted into trench warfare. I suppose it's a way, sensible or not, to deal with certain developments in modern usage that, for the sake of keeping peace in the sentence, force us to pretend such a preposition is real. I have faith the truth will out itself eventually: that simply illogical grammar will simply belie illogical thinking. However, I leave it to your good judgment to decide for yourself if you think these make more sense to you as participles or prepositions. Whatever makes the center—and the sentence— work for you, right?
If nothing else, this debate proves that what we hold to be fool-proof in grammar can, with a little finagling, be made just as rule-proof. Here, then, are my top picks for present participial prepositions to watch. Dangle them with care, my lovelies:
Karl J Sherlock
Associate Professor, English
Email: karl.sherlock@gcccd.edu
Phone: 619-644-7871
8800 Grossmont College Drive
El Cajon, California 92020
619-644-7000
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