A less common type of adposition is the circumposition, which consists of two parts that appear on each side of the complement.
In some languages, including Sindhi, Hindustani, Turkish, Hungarian, Korean, and Japanese, the same kinds of words typically come after their complement.
There are also some cases where the function is performed by two parts coming before and after the complement; this is called a circumposition (from Latin circum- prefix "around").
Prepositions, postpositions and circumpositions are collectively known as adpositions (using the Latin prefix ad-, meaning "to").
However, some linguists prefer to use the well-known and longer-established term preposition in place of adposition, irrespective of position relative to the complement.
An adposition establishes a grammatical relationship that links its complement to another word or phrase in the context.
While the term preposition sometimes denotes any adposition, its stricter meaning refers only to one that precedes its complement.
", and the French Il fait trop froid, je ne suis pas habillée pour ("It's too cold, I'm not dressed for [the situation].")
The bolded words in these examples are generally still considered prepositions because when they form a phrase with a complement (in more ordinary constructions) they must appear first.
[5] However, ambiposition may also be used to refer to a circumposition (see below),[6] or to a word that appears to function as a preposition and postposition simultaneously, as in the Vedic Sanskrit construction (noun-1) ā (noun-2), meaning "from (noun-1) to (noun-2)".
[7] Whether a language has primarily prepositions or postpositions is seen as an aspect of its typological classification, and tends to correlate with other properties related to head directionality.
This is only a tendency, however; an example of a language that behaves differently is Latin, which employs mostly prepositions, even though it typically places verbs after their objects.
For example, in the native Californian Timbisha language, the phrase "from a mean cold" can be translated using the word order "cold from mean"—the inposition follows the noun but precedes any following modifiers that form part of the same noun phrase.
Preposition stranding is also found in some Niger–Congo languages such as Vata and Gbadi, and in some North American varieties of French.
Some prescriptive English grammars teach that prepositions cannot end a sentence, although there is no rule prohibiting that use.
Otto Jespersen, in his Essentials of English Grammar (first published 1933), commented on this definition-derived rule: "...nor need a preposition (Latin: praepositio) stand before the word it governs (go the fools among (Sh[akespeare]); What are you laughing at?).
For example, current German orthographic conventions recognize the indeterminate status of certain prepositions, allowing two spellings: anstelle/an Stelle ("instead of"), aufgrund/auf Grund ("because of"), mithilfe/mit Hilfe ("by means of"), zugunsten/zu Gunsten ("in favor of"), zuungunsten/zu Ungunsten ("to the disadvantage of"), zulasten/zu Lasten ("at the expense of").
Examples of simple and complex prepositions that have been so classified include prima di ("before") and davanti (a) ("in front of") in Italian,[18] and ergo ("on account of") and causa ("for the sake of") in Latin.
This may be regarded as a complement representing a different syntactic category, or simply as an atypical form of noun phrase (see nominalization).
Adpositions can be used to express a wide range of semantic relations between their complement and the rest of the context.
Because of the variety of meanings, a single adposition often has many possible equivalents in another language, depending on the exact context.
Examples of such expressions are: Prepositions sometimes mark roles that may be considered largely grammatical: Spatial meanings of adpositions may be either directional or static.
Unless used with a pronoun the form is always o and not the "stem", e.g. dw i'n dod o Gymru – 'I come from Wales', gormod o gwrw – 'too much (of) beer'.
Inflected prepositions are found in Semitic languages, including Hebrew,[24] Arabic, Assyrian Neo-Aramaic and Amharic.
Bororo, an indigenous language of Brazil, uses postpositions in all contexts: tori ji 'about the mountains'.
When these modify a pronoun rather than a full noun, the phrase contracts into an inflected postposition[25] (and therefore looks like a pronominal prefix, rather than a suffix as in the examples above: bagai 'for', i-wagai 'for me').
Some adverbs are derived from the fusion of a preposition and its complement (such as downstairs, from down (the) stairs, and underground, from under (the) ground).
As noted in previous sections, Chinese can also be said to have postpositions, although these can be analyzed as nominal (noun) elements.
For example, the post-nominal elements in Japanese and Korean are sometimes called case particles and sometimes postpositions.
Turkish, Finnish and Hungarian have both extensive case-marking and postpositions, but there is evidence to help distinguish the two: In these examples, the case markings form a word with their hosts (as shown by vowel harmony, other word-internal effects and agreement of adjectives in Finnish), while the postpositions are independent words.