Passing his hands over the desk or resting his elbows upon the desk, he often looks across the desk and speaks of the desk or concerning the desk as if there were nothing else like the desk. If he's clumsy, he can bump into the desk or try to walk through the desk (and stuff would fall off the desk). He can stand beside the desk (meaning next to the desk), before the desk, between the desk and you, or even on the desk (if he's really strange). The professor can sit on the desk (when he's being informal) or behind the desk, and then his feet are under the desk or beneath the desk. You can sit before the desk (or in front of the desk). This whole phrase, in turn, takes on a modifying role, acting as an adjective or an adverb, locating something in time and space, modifying a noun, or telling when or where or under what conditions something happened.Ĭonsider the professor's desk and all the prepositional phrases we can use while talking about it. Prepositional phrases can be made up of a million different words, but they tend to be built the same: a preposition followed by a determiner and an adjective or two, followed by a pronoun or noun (called the object of the preposition). Prepositions are nearly always combined with other words in structures called prepositional phrases. For instance, when you do try to define a preposition like 'in' or 'between' or 'on,' you invariably use your hands to show how something is situated in relationship to something else. In itself, a word like 'in' or 'after' is rather meaningless and hard to define in mere words. A preposition describes a relationship between other words in a sentence.

Prepositions of time quiz