Circumposition is rare in English due to confusing prepositional object placement, but common in French and Mandarin. It combines a preposition and postposition to create a closed sentence, but is difficult to translate literally. Circumpositions in foreign languages often have different meanings from their literal translations.
Circumposition occurs when a prepositional phrase contains two prepositions, one at the beginning of the phrase and one at the end. This is called circumposition because the sentence is surrounded by prepositions. These are rare in the English language because prepositional object placement becomes confusing if not done correctly. Foreign languages, such as French and Mandarin Chinese, are better suited to circumposition because their prepositions are more fluid. When translated literally into English, these sentences are examples of circumposition, but they sound strange.
Very specifically, circumposition combines the use of a preposition and a postposition to create a closed sentence. The postposition range usually consists of the same words as the preposition range, the only difference between the two being where the words are placed. Prepositions always come before the prepositional object, while postpositions come after. For example, “four days ago” and “three minutes ago” are both postpositional phrases. “After three days” and “within five minutes” are both prepositional phrases.
Turning prepositional phrases into circumpositions can be difficult because circumpositional phrases usually don’t refer to concrete places. They must also appear at the beginning or middle of a sentence due to the English grammar rule that no sentence should end with a preposition. Some examples of this device in English include “from now on”, “in place of”, “with a mind to” and “in virtue of”. All of these sentences are explanatory and come before or after the main context of a sentence. One reason this device is so rare in English is that these sentences are emphasized and unnecessary for everyday speech.
In other languages, such as French and Mandarin, the meaning of the sentence is different from the literal translation. For example, the French phrase à un détail près is literally translated “to a close detail”. When translated for the meaning, the sentence becomes “except for a detail”. The same goes for some Mandarin phrases, such as cóng bīngxīang lǐ, which is literally translated as “from the refrigerator into”. Of course, a translator would bring this sentence into English as “from inside the refrigerator,” putting both prepositions before the prepositional object.
When looking at circumposition in foreign languages, it’s relatively easy to see why it can exist more readily in some languages than others. Mandarin, for example, contains very simple and short sentences without much extra language. Other languages, such as French and Spanish, sometimes add prepositions to word endings instead of pronouncing them as separate words. This is why foreign languages contain more circumposition cases than English.
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