In some languages, an inflected preposition, or conjugated preposition, is a word formed from the contraction of a preposition with a personal pronoun. For instance, in Scottish Gaelic, to say "before him," one would not say ro e, but roimhe, an amalgamation of the two words. Conjugated prepositions are commonly reanalysed as inflected words by native speakers and by traditional grammar.
Inflected prepositions are found in the Insular Celtic languages (including Scottish Gaelic, Irish, Welsh, and Breton) and in many Semitic languages including Hebrew (לי "to me")[1] and Arabic.
Languages that do not have full paradigms of inflected prepositions may allow contraction of prepositions and pronouns to a more limited extent. In Polish, for instance, a handful of common prepositions allow amalgamated forms (in formal registers) with 3rd person pronouns: na niego ("on him/it") → nań.[2] However, these contracted forms are very archaic and rarely heard in daily speech. One can also detect a similar phenomenon in Portuguese in the forms comigo (with me), contigo (with you, singular), consigo (with him/her/itself), conosco/connosco (with us), and convosco (with you, plural).
The term prepositional pronoun is also used sometimes for inflected preposition, but this may cause confusion with another sense of this expression. (See prepositional pronoun.)
References
- ^ Glinert, Lewis. Modern Hebrew: An Essential Grammar, 2nd edition, Routledge UK, pp. 41-44. ISBN 0-415-10190-5.
- ^ Swan, Oscar E. (2002). A Grammar of Contemporary Polish. Bloomington, IN: Slavica. ISBN 0-89357-296-9.
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