Aboard, About, Above, Across, After, Against, Along, Among, Around, At, Before, Behind

Preposition:

The technical definition of a preposition seems a bit vague to me. “A preposition is a word that shows a relationship between a noun or pronoun and some other word in the sentence. A better definition says that a preposition is a word that shows spatial relationships. Some teachers begin by teaching prepositions by telling students that a preposition is anything a squirrel can do to a tree.. run (under the tree), climb (up the tree), jump (across the tree), etc. In all these examples, you will notice that the preposition is at the beginning of a prepositional phrase which is marked for you in parenthesis. For a word to function as a preposition, it must have an object of that preposition and be part of a prepositional phrase. It is essential that you be able to recognize and identify prepositional phrases in sentences. Remember a prepositional phrase always begins with a preposition and ends with its object.

PREPOSITIONS:

Aboard, about, above, across, after, against, along, among, around, at, before, behind, below, beneath, beside, between, beyond, by, down, during, except, for, from, in, into, like, of, off, on, over, past, since, through, throughout, to, toward, under, underneath, until, up, upon, with, within, without, but ( when it means except)

Once you are able to identify all prepositional phrases, it will be easier to analyze the rest of the sentence because the subject, verb, and sentence complements (direct object, indirect object, predicate noun, predicate adjective) will never be found in a prepositional phrase.

Example: After the movie we drove the car across town to a beautiful lake for a picnic with our friends.

After the moviewe drove the caracross town to a beautiful lake for a picnic with our friends.

After eliminating all the prepositional phrases you are left with only “we drove the car” to analyze for the subject and verb and direct object.

we- subject

drove- is the verb

The car- is the direct object

In this sentence the simple subject is the pronoun, “we.” The action verb is “drove.”

We know to ask, “Drove what?” or “Drove who?” to check for a direct object after the action verb.

Since we get an answer, “car” and “car” is a noun, we know that car is the direct object. This sentence in its original form has seven nouns and pronouns. The best way to determine how these words are functioning is to use the process of elimination and identify those nouns working as objects of the preposition first.

Next, you can check the other four functions of the nouns and pronouns beginning with the simple subject since all sentences must have a subject. Analyzing the verb next brought us to the logical conclusion that “car” was a direct object.