Prepositional verbs are made up of a verb and a preposition, and are transitive with a noun or pronoun following the preposition. They are considered idiomatic expressions and inseparable, unlike some phrasal verbs.
In English grammar, a prepositional verb is made up of a verb and a preposition. For example, in the sentence “waiting”, the word “waiting” is the verb and the word “for” is the preposition. Along with propositional verbs, there are other types of multi-word verbs, also known as phrasal verbs. Prepositional verbs are also considered idiomatic expressions, meaning that the words that make up the verbs have different literal meanings separately from what they have when combined. Finally, for multi-word verbs to truly be considered prepositional verbs, a noun or pronoun must follow the preposition.
There are many types of multi-word verbs, and it can be difficult to tell the difference between them. One way to recognize that a multiword verb is a prepositional verb is to consider a few factors. Unlike some multi-word verbs, prepositional verbs are transitive, meaning they have direct objects. In the sentence “She walked down the street,” the street is the direct object and walked down is the prepositional verb. The direct object in the sentence, “I went for an impulse,” is an impulse, while the prepositional verb went for.
While some phrasal verbs can be found at the end of a sentence, this cannot be the case with prepositional verbs because the preposition must be followed by a noun or pronoun. In the sentence “She didn’t want to jump off,” jump off is a phrasal verb, but it’s not a prepositional verb. The sentence “He didn’t want to jump off the tree,” however, contains a prepositional verb. Jump is the verb, from is the preposition and “the tree” is the noun following the preposition.
Some transitive phrasal verbs are separable, but a prepositional verb is inseparable, which means that the sentence will not make sense if the verb and the preposition are separated by other words. In the sentence “She was sitting on the chair”, the word “sat” is the verb and the word “up” is the preposition. If the prepositional verb were separated and the sentence written as “She was sitting on the chair,” the sentence would no longer make sense or be grammatically correct.
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