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lexical meaning is more vivid in the recently created derivative
prepositions (коло, близько, неподалік) and it is shadowed in
primary prepositions. Besides prepositions possess the categorial
(or grammatical) meaning which is understood as the property of
prepositions to point out towards syntactic relations between
words (that is relations of subordination).
2) its bilateral combinability with a right-hand noun (or
noun- equivalent) and a left-hand combinability with a word
belonging to almost any part of speech;
3) its syntactic function of a linking word.
Prepositions are not characterized by any grammatical categories
or typical stem-building elements.
As far as their structure is concerned English prepositions,
like other parts of speech, fall into the following groups:
1) simple or primitive, e.g. at, in, of, by, with, for, etc;
2) derivative, e.g. below, beside, along, etc;
3) compound, e.g. inside, within, into, throughout, etc.;
4) composit, e.g. instead of, in accordance with, owing to, in
front of, etc.
Many prepositions are homonymous with adverbs (about,
before, below, down, since, etc.), conjunctions (before, since,
etc.), particles (regarding, concerning, etc.), lexico-grammatical
word-morphemes (in, on, up, etc.). Similar to other parts of
speech the lexico-grammatical meaning of prepositions is an
abstraction from their individual lexical meanings. Let us
compare the following combinations of words: the book in the
bag, the book on the bag, the book under the bag, the book near
the bag.
In all of them the preposition shows the relation of one
noun to another, which reflects the relations of the corresponding
substances in the world of reality. This meaning of "relations (of
substances)" common to all prepositions is their lexico-
grammatical meaning. But each preposition in the expressions
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