A small word showing a relationship — in, on, under, after, with. Some languages put it after the noun instead of before.
Also called: adposition.
In precise terms
Adpositions relate a noun phrase to the rest of the clause, expressing spatial, temporal or abstract relations. They are called prepositions when they precede their complement and postpositions when they follow it.
An example
Masanın üstünde.
On the table.
What is going on here
Turkish places the relational element after the noun, and the noun takes genitive case: literally 'of-the-table its-top'. English 'on the table' puts the preposition first and marks the noun not at all. Both express the same spatial relation with opposite ordering.
Why this matters when you are learning a language
Adpositions almost never translate one-to-one, and they are the single most common source of small persistent errors. Learning them as fixed phrases with the verb, rather than as isolated words, is usually more effective.
Across languages
Prepositional languages (English, Spanish, Arabic) tend to put objects after verbs; postpositional languages (Turkish, Japanese, Hindi) tend to put objects before them. The two patterns correlate strongly, which is one of the classic findings of word-order typology.
Related terms
- Prepositional phraseIntermediate — A preposition plus the noun phrase it governs — 'on the table', 'after lunch'.
- Grammatical caseIntermediate — Endings on nouns showing their role in the sentence — who did it, who it was done to, whose it is.
- Word orderIntermediate — The order in which subject, verb and object normally appear.
- Linguistic typologyAdvanced — Classifying languages by their structural features rather than their family history.
Where to go next
- Language guides — See grammatical and lexical categories used in context.
- Terminology quiz — Test the terms on this page.