Definition:
A group of words made up of a preposition, its object, and any of the object's modifiers. See also:
- Identifying Prepositional Phrases
- Adding Prepositional Phrases to the Basic Sentence
- Arranging Prepositional Phrases
- Sentence Building with Prepositional Phrases
Examples:
- "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) - "It is time for us to turn to each other, not on each other."
(Jesse Jackson) - "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) - "I remember my discovery ten years ago, that graves everywhere planted heads to the west."
(Kim R. Stafford, "December Meditation at Camp Polk Cemetery") - "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") - "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)
