A prepositional pronoun is a special form of a personal pronoun that is used as the object of a preposition. In some languages, an inflected preposition, or conjugated preposition, is a word formed from the contraction of a preposition with a personal pronoun. ... Personal pronouns are pronouns often used as substitutes for proper or common nouns. ... In grammar, an adposition is an element that combines syntactically with a phrase and indicates how that phrase should be interpreted in the surrounding context. ...

English does not have distinct prepositional forms of pronouns. The same set of objective pronouns are used after verbs and prepositions (e.g. watch him, look at him). In some other languages, a special set of pronouns is required in prepositional contexts (although the individual pronouns in this set may also be found in other contexts). The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... An objective pronoun functions as the target of a verb, as distinguished from a subjective pronoun, which is the initiator of a verb. ...

Inflectional forms in Romance

In the Romance languages, prepositions combine with stressed pronominal forms that are distinct from the unstressed clitic pronouns used with verbs. In French, prepositions combine with disjunctive pronouns, which are also found in other syntactic contexts (see French disjunctive pronouns). In Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and Romanian, prepositions generally combine with pronouns that are identical in form to nominative (subject) pronouns, but there are unique prepositional forms for the 1st and 2nd person singular (and 3rd person reflexive). (This is also true in Catalan, but the 2nd person singular prepositional form is identical to the nominative.) The Romance languages (sometimes referred to as Romanic languages) are a branch of the Indo-European language family, comprising all the languages that descend from Latin, the language of the Roman Empire. ... In linguistics, a clitic is an element that has some of the properties of an independent word and some more typical of a bound morpheme. ... A disjunctive pronoun is a stressed form of a pronoun reserved for use in isolation or in certain syntactic contexts. ... Personal pronouns in French: The French possessive pronouns (mon, ma, mes, ton, ta, tes, son, sa, ses, notre, notre, nos, votre, votre, vos, leur, leur, leurs) are technically adjectives because they decline into masculine, feminine and plural forms and further agree with their heads (not their antecedents). ...

Consider the Portuguese sentences below:

Vejo-te todos os dias. (enclitic object of verb)

"I see you every day."

Não te culpo. (proclitic object of verb)

"I don't blame you."

Anseio por ti. (prepositional pronoun)

"I long for you."

The verbs ver "to see" and culpar "to blame" in the first two sentences are non-prepositional, so they are accompanied by the normal objective pronoun te "you". In the third sentence, the verb ansiar (por) "to long (for)" is prepositional, so its object, which follows the preposition, takes the form ti.

Prefixed forms in Slavic

In many Slavic languages (e.g. Czech, Polish, and Russian), prepositional pronouns have the same basic case-inflected forms as pronouns in other syntactic contexts. However, the 3rd person non-reflexive pronouns (which are vowel- or glide-initial) take the prefix n- when they are the object of a preposition. The following examples are from Russian:  Countries where a West Slavic language is the national language  Countries where an East Slavic language is the national language  Countries where a South Slavic language is the national language The Slavic languages (also called Slavonic languages), a group of closely related languages of the Slavic peoples and a subgroup...

Я его не вижу. ("I him-GEN NEG see" = "I don't see him.")

Я это сделаю для него. ("I this do for him-GEN" = "I will do this for him.")

References

• Personal pronouns of Portuguese at Orbis Latinus
• Portuguese prepositional pronouns (an overview)

See also

• Prepositional case
• Portuguese pronouns
• Spanish pronouns
• French personal pronouns

Prepositional case is a grammatical case that marks prepositions. ... The pronouns of the Portuguese language have flexions according to their number and, in case of some third person forms, also according to their gender. ... The Spanish language has a range of pronouns that in some ways work quite differently from English ones. ... Personal pronouns in French: The French possessive pronouns (mon, ma, mes, ton, ta, tes, son, sa, ses, notre, notre, nos, votre, votre, vos, leur, leur, leurs) are technically adjectives because they decline into masculine, feminine and plural forms and further agree with their heads (not their antecedents). ...

External links

• Origin of the Pronouns, Pronominal Adjectives and Pronominal Adverbs in the Modern Romance Languages, at Orbis Latinus

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