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A postposition is a type of adposition, a grammatical particle that expresses some sort of relationship between a noun phrase (its object) and another part of the sentence; an adpositional phrase functions as an adjective or adverb. Postpositions are adpositions which follow their objects. The equivalent of the postposition in English is the preposition, which differs in that it precedes its object.Here are some examples of languages that use postpositions:
- Dutch: het huis in (literally, "the house into"; naturally, "into the house")
- Finnish: talon edessä ("house in front of"), talon takana ("house behind of")
- German: dir gegenüber ("you opposite"); ihr zuliebe ("her sake for"), ihm zufolge ("him according to")
- Hindi: kamra mẽ ("room in")
- Hungarian: kutya nélkül ("dog without")
- Japanese: doko ni ("where at"), doko e ("where to")
- Korean: Hanguk e ("Korea to")
- Turkish: evin önünde ("house in front of"), evin arkasinda ("house behind of")
English has one postposition: "ago"; however, English also has a tendency to form postpositional compound words, such as "thereafter" and "wherein", a quality likely borrowed from Latin, a fellow prepositional language. Some English speakers also tend to use prepositions postpositionally when their objects are interrogative pronounAn interrogative pronoun (also known simply as an interrogative is a pronoun used in asking questions. The interrogative pronouns of English are: Adjectival 'which', used to ask for a choice out of a known number of choices; or 'what', used for one out ofs, such as in "Where to?" or "What for?".
There is a tendency for languages to be postpositional when the object of the verb precedes the verb in the unmarked sentenceIn linguistics the sentence is a unit of language, characterised in most languages by the presence of a finite verb. For example, " The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. The shortest legal sentences in the English language are "I am" and "I do" als (especially the very common SOV order). However, this is only a tendency (Latin itself is typically SOV). The use of postpositions also correlates with the tendency to place adjectives before the noun they modify.
Parts of speech
