Definition:
A group of words made up of a preposition, its object, and any of the object's modifiers.
Prepositional phrases can modify nouns, verbs, phrases, and complete clauses. As demonstrated by several of the examples below, prepositional phrases can be embedded inside other prepositional phrases.
See also:
- What Are Prepositional Phrases?
- Adjective Phrases and Adverb Phrases
- Complex Prepositions
- How to Arrange Prepositional Phrases
- Notes on Prepositions
- Postmodifier
- Preposition Stranding
Exercises:
- Exercise in Identifying Infinitive Phrases
- Exercise in Identifying Prepositional Phrases
- Expanding Sentences With Prepositional Phrases
- Practice in Identifying Prepositional Phrases
- Sentence Building with Prepositional Phrases
Examples:
- "I will not obey the voices in my head."
(Bart Simpson, The Simpsons, 2000) - "Above the trees and rooftops the dingy glare of the London sky faded upwards into weak violet heights."
(Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty. Picador, 2004) - "On the counter near the stove in a silvery pan was a deep-dish berry cobbler."
(Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970) - "With spry jingles of the bell on her handlebars, a woman sped by in a crimson smock and a witchy black hat."
(Martin Amis, Lionel Asbo: State of England. Alfred A. Knopf, 2012) - "It was the hour of twilight on a soft spring day toward the end of April in the year of our Lord 1929, and George Webber leaned his elbows on the sill of his back window and looked out at what he could see of New York."
(Thomas Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again, 1940) - "To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself. . . . Anybody can have ideas--the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph."
(Mark Twain) - "Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher."
(Flannery O'Connor) - "We walked out of the gallows yard, past the condemned cells with their waiting prisoners, into the big central yard of the prison."
(George Orwell, "A Hanging," 1931) - "A young woman with long hair and a short white halter dress walks through the casino at the Riviera in Las Vegas at one in the morning. It was precisely this moment that made Play It As It Lays begin to tell itself to me."
(Joan Didion) - "East of my grandmother's house, south of the pecan grove, there is buried a woman in a beautiful dress."
(N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain, 1969) - "When I went off to college, my father gave me, as part of my tuition, fifty pounds of moose meat."
(Brenda Peterson, "Growing Up Game") - "Next morning early I started afoot for Walden, out Main Street and down Thoreau, past the depot and the Minuteman Chevrolet Company. The morning was fresh, and in a bean field along the way I flushed an agriculturalist, quietly studying his beans."
(E.B. White, "Walden," June 1939) - "She had pewter-colored hair set in a ruthless permanent, a hard beak, and large moist eyes with the sympathetic expression of wet stones."
(Raymond Chandler, The High Window, 1942) - "Marge, there's an empty spot I've always had inside me. I tried to fill it with family, religion, community service, but those were dead ends! I think this chair is the answer."
(Homer in The Simpsons) - "It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents--except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."
(Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford, 1830)
Observations:
- "Academic writing is particularly packed with prepositional phrases because they allow a writer to structure a great deal of information compactly. In fact several adverbial phrases can occur in one sentence, and often they do. . . . [P]repositional phrases are flexible in their syntactic roles, modifying functions, and sentence positions. The extraordinarily high frequency of prepositional phrases, combined with their flexibility, is the reason that students have to learn to recognize prepositional phrases and use them appropriately in their writing."
(Eli Hinkel, Teaching Academic ESL Writing: Practical Techniques in Vocabulary and Grammar. Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004)
