Prepositional phrases

So far we've only seen examples of connecting a preposition to a noun group. But can you connect them to verb groups? And if you do, what happens?

Well, snap! We did exactly that in the first sentence! (Can you spot it? So sneaky!)

Let's look at some more examples.

So prepositional phrases can end with a verb group, but notice that all the actions use the -ing form of the verb (punching, eating, defying). This makes these processes seem more like "things" for the purpose of understanding the sentence as a whole.

There's another way we can turn an action into a "thing". What do you notice about these next variations?

This time we used what we normally think of as 'question words' like when, what and how to convert processes into "things" that can work in a prepositional phrase.

We could have a whole lesson about this group of words (they're called complementisers, and you'll get more familiar with them when you learn about clauses and complex sentences). But for now it's enough to recognise the basic effect of question words in this context.

You might have noticed that while a process is not, strictly speaking, a noun group, the basic pattern in prepositional phrases is still basically preposition + thing. Since we don't want to make our highlighting more complicated than it needs to be, we'll highlight all our noun groups, -ing verbs and question word groups as things for the rest of this lesson.

Let's rewrite a few of these snippets to practice.