Language syntax treats adpositional phrases as units that act as arguments or adjuncts.
Postpositional elements are frequent in head-final languages such as Basque, Estonian, Finnish, Georgian, Korean, Japanese, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali and Tamil.
The following examples are from Japanese, where the case markers perform a role similar to that of adpositions: And from Finnish, where the case endings perform a role similar to that of adpositions: While English is generally seen as lacking postpositions entirely, there are a couple of words that one can in fact view as postpositions, e.g. the crisis two years ago, sleep the whole night through.
The trees that follow represent adpositional phrases according to two modern conventions for rendering sentence structure, first in terms of the constituency relation of phrase structure grammars and then in terms of the dependency relation of dependency grammars.
The following trees show prepositional phrases as postdependents of nouns and adjectives: And the following trees show prepositional phrases as postdependents of non-finite verbs and as predependents of finite verbs: Attempts to position a prepositional phrase in front of its head noun, adjective, or non-finite verb create an incorrectly formatted sentence, e.g.
The b-examples demonstrate that prepositional phrases in English prefer to appear as postdependents of their heads.