Serving as Other Parts of Speech
Many words that serve as prepositions also serve as other parts of speech. The word up, for example, acts as a preposition:
He looked up the tree. (prepositional phrase)But the word up can also serve as an adverb:
He looked up. (adverb modifying looked)And the word up can join a verb to form what’s called a complement verb, or phrasal verb, a verb consisting of a verb and a merged preposition (drop out, dredge up):
He looked up the word. (part of complement verb look up)Some words can act as a preposition and a subordinating conjunction:
He left after the movie. (preposition)
After the movie ended, he left. (subordinating conjunction)
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