Aircoach (2 Viewers)

[classic seanc]

preposition

or proposition?

Its pedantic thursday for seanc

 

[paula]

preposition!

 

[quasiquasi]

Yeah it's one of those funny words that aren't immediately clear (to me at least) as regards part of speech. The OED thinks it's an adv. (conj., and rel. pron.), whatever that means exactly, but the fact that it forms constituents that tend to modify non-nominals is no reason to debar it from prepositionhood - lots of prototypical prepositional phrases do this too. Of course, 'as' often appears in places where it can't be a preposition, but in contexts like "as handy as John Major" I'd say 'as ... as' or the elliptical 'as' is as justifiably a preposition as it is anything else. Probably.

The OED definition of "preposition" is "One of the Parts of Speech: an indeclinable word or particle serving to mark the relation between two notional words, the latter of which is usually a substantive or pronoun; as, sow in hope, good for food, one for you, Stratford on Avon, late in time." Don't see anything there to rule out "as".

Sorry for belabouring the obvious, I was thinking out loud, or out visible I guess.

 

[quasiquasi]

I've changed my mind again...you can argue that "(as) handy as John Major" is actually elliptical for "(as) handy as John Major (is/was/seemed/etc.)" => "as" takes a sentence as its object and is actually a complementiser or something like that.

Nonetheless, usages such as "He came to the party dressed as John Major" and "He was disappointing as Prime Minister" still seem prepositional to me.

In conclusion: I'm confused.

 

[Super Dexta]

depressingly, it's only a year since i did my finals in linguistics, and i have no idea what you're talking about.