Prepositions

In English you use prepositions to connect nouns or between nouns and pronouns. Imagine that you encounter two nouns: elephant and book. You can use prepositions in many ways to connect the two nouns to express different ideas:

the book about the cat

the book by the cat

the book behind the cat

the book in front of the cat

the book near the cat

the book under the cat

The italicized words relate two nouns to each other. These relationship words are called prepositions.

Prepositions may be defined as any word or group of words that relates a noun or a pronoun to another word in the sentence.

 

Take a look at the following table for a list of some common prepositions:

Common Prepositions
about	above	according to	across
after	against	along	amid
among	around	at	before
behind	below	beside	besides
between	beyond	by	concerning
down	during	except	for
from	in	into	like
of	off	on	over
past	since	through	toward
underneath	until	up	upon
with	within	without

Prepositions never travel alone; they’re always with an object. In the earlier examples, the object of each preposition is cat.

Just to get all the annoying terminology over with at once, a prepositional phrase consists of a preposition and an object. The object of a preposition is always a noun or a pronoun, or perhaps one or two of each. (A pronoun is a word that takes the place of a noun, such as him for Robert, it for sandwich, and so forth.) 

See if you can match the preposition to the cat's position