If you're a high school teacher looking to foster an interest in how languages work, consider getting your students involved in the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad. The puzzles are really interesting, and the top performers go on to International Linguistics Olympiad.

Last year, I lit into Stephen Fry for his pedantry over none.

I am delighted to see that he has apparently recanted:

At some point in your schooling, you were almost certainly introduced to verb tenses. We'll develop a precise understanding of tense in a moment, but for now, think back to what you were taught. What is tense? How many different tenses can you remember learning for English? Take a moment to jot down what you can remember before continuing.

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The presence of a noun phrase after a preposition is so common that traditional grammar books often state that a preposition must always be followed by a noun phrase. Certain exceptions, however, make it clear that we cannot accept that assertion.

First, prepositions will sometimes have other prepositional phrases as complements:

(10) The plane emerged from behind the cloud.

From and behind are both prepositions. But notice that from behind the cloud forms a single constituent. You can move it to the front of a cleft sentence:

(10a) From behind the cloud is where the plane emerged.

Compare the following two sentences:

(2) Ken looked up her number.
(3) Ken looked up her dress.

A little scrutiny will show that up does not have the same function in both sentences. For example, while we can create a cleft sentence with up her dress, we can't do the same thing with up her number:

(2a) *Up her number is what Ken looked.
(3a) Up her dress is where Ken looked.

Also, we can move up to the end of the first sentence, but not the second:

(2b) Ken looked her number up.
(3b) *Ken looked her dress up.

Not everything that looks like a preposition actually behaves like one. For example, the word to followed by a verb phrase forms an infinitive phrase. These infinitive phrases, which we will examine more closely in a later chapter, are verb phrases, not prepositional phrases. We can see this if we contrast infinitive to with the preposition.

(1a) My kids always want [to go] [to Disneyland].

In this sentence, the verb want has two constituents that begin with to, but the first is followed by the verb go, and the second by an NP. There are several ways in which the first instance of to behaves very differently from the second.

Prepositional phrases have a variety of functions. They can modify a noun, as in "the child with a runny nose," or verbs, as in "she came from Panama." When PPs modify verbs, they have functions that can often be filled by adverb phrases, or occasionally by other phrase types as well. Constituents that function in this role are sometimes called adverbials, because these constituents answer adverb-like questions such as when, where, how, or why. Similarly, PPs that modify nouns are sometimes called adjectivals. But be careful with these terms. They do not imply that the PPs actually become adverbs or adjectives. Remember that adjective and adverb are categories for words, not for phrases. The terms adverbial and adjectival simply tell you what sort of constituent the phrase modifies. Because this information can also be conveyed by a tree diagram, we won't use these particular terms much, but you should be aware of them, since other works on English grammar use them frequently.