Prepositional pronouns are required when a pronoun is the object of a preposition. Prepositions express a relationship between two words and must have a noun as their object. Personal pronouns have subjective and objective forms, and the objective form of a prepositional pronoun is the same as its personal pronoun. Some languages have multiple forms of pronouns depending on their grammatical usage.
Quite simply, a prepositional pronoun is the specific type of pronoun required if it is the object of a preposition. Prepositions are parts of speech that begin a sentence expressing a relationship between two words. In the English language, about, above and across are only three out of about one hundred prepositions. All prepositional sentences must contain a noun that is the object of the preposition. When that noun is a pronoun, it is called a prepositional pronoun.
In the sentence “She kissed him on the cheek,” the word on is a preposition. The noun cheek is the object of that preposition, linking it to the verb “kissed”. The relational question addressed is: where did she kiss. Prepositions are versatile words found in every language in the world. The relationships described by words such as “with” and “for” are fundamental in describing human social experience.
A pronoun is a generic replacement word used in place of a noun. Presumably, the woman in the example sentence from the previous paragraph has a proper noun and the pronoun takes its place. The same goes for the pronoun he. Both refer to persons, and are therefore called personal pronouns. They also represent the two specific types of personal pronouns in the English language: the subjective and the objective.
“She kissed him on the cheek.” She is the subject of the sentence. “He” is the object of the verb “kissed”, and the pronoun must therefore be changed to its objective form he. The personal pronouns are “I” for the first person, “you” for the second person and “he” for the third person. There are plural pronouns for each case, such as “we” for the first person, and gender-distinct pronouns are common in many languages of the world.
All of the pronouns above have their own objective form, such as “we” for the first person plural. In English, the objective pronoun is the identical form of the prepositional pronoun. “She danced with him.” Since he is the object of the preposition with, this prepositional pronoun must take the objective form. Besides the personal pronouns, there is a single interrogative pronoun — who — which also has an objective form — who.
Unlike English, there are other languages that have many multiple forms of pronouns depending on their grammatical usage. This can include a separate form to be the direct object of a verb or the object of a preposition. Spanish and Portuguese are two examples. Some languages, such as Arabic, employ inflected prepositions, essentially contracting a preposition and combining it with the prepositional pronoun into a single compound word. Other languages may even have completely different forms of the same pronoun when it is the subject of some of the more common prepositions such as from, in and with.
Protect your devices with Threat Protection by NordVPN
