Common Prepositions in Chinese

[Ding Yiyi]

I can find lists and lists of the English prepositions online, and look them up in a dictionary, but not all of them have Chinese sentences with them. This poses a problem because I know that in English we don't always plop a preposition with the same format at the same place in a sentence, and I assume the same goes for Chinese (I don't know much about Chinese grammar. We just covered the "S-V-O-V 得-很/太/不 Adj." constuction, and my teacher is slowly teaching us as many of the uses of 了before the end of the school year. We're working out of the New Practical Chinese Reader Level 2 now, we have just begun it).

Any basic prepositions you can think, and an example sentence (or two if it's a difficult word) would be really appreciated. I looked up "prepositions" in the site search engine, but I didn't find anything. If I missed it, point me in the right direction.

Thanks

丁一一

[atitarev]

There are not many prepositions in Chinese (e.g. 于 yú)

The role of prepositions or sometime postpositions (if they follow after a word) is carried out by verbs:

我用笔写字。

Wǒ yòng bǐ xiě zì.

I write (characters) with a pen.

他坐飞机到中国去。

Tā zuò fēijī dào Zhōngguó qù.

He goes to China by plane.

桌子上

Zhuōzi shàng

On the table

[HashiriKata]

从这儿到那儿。

Cóng zhèr dào nàr. (From here to there)

In examples such as the above, it may be handy to say that 从 and 到 are prepositions when being asked what they are and what they are doing in the sentence. However, in my view, a list of Chinese prepositions to learn from is not very useful and can be misleading, and this is perhaps the reason why it's difficult to find such lists. Since the so called "prepositions" in Chinese can also act as verbs (or co-verbs), and together with the reason Atitarev mentioned above (ie. a preposition in English may call for something completely different in Chinese), I'd advise you to learn each individually as and when you come accross them. Anyway, below are a few I've thought of, if you still find the idea of listing attractive (The underlined characters are the "prepositions"):

对我，这是太好了！

Duì wǒ，zhè shì tài hǎo le！(To me, this is too good!)

我在这儿等你。

Wǒ zài zhèr děng nǐ. (I'll wait for you here)

与/跟/和/同他交往。

Yǔ/gēn/hé/tóng tā jiāowǎng. (Associate with him)

离这儿不远。

Lí zhèr bù yuǎn. (Not far from here)

沿河往南走。

Yánhé wǎng nán zǒu. (Go South along the river)

替我请假

Tì wǒ qǐngjià (Ask for leave for me)

这个项目由他负责。

zhège xiàngmù yóu tā fùzé. (He's in charge of this item)

给你做饭。

Gěi nǐ zuòfàn. (Cook for you)

关于这个问题，

Guānyú zhège wèntí，(Concerning this problem)

朝南看

Cháo nán kàn (Look in the South direction)

[the.yangist]

This will be a more technical resurrection on this topic, so here goes.

Adpositions (which are prepositions, adpostitions, and circumpositions) are largely a string of predicates such that one argument place in particular (the second) is a NP. This means that adpositions share a general logical form of Q(_,t), where Q is a predicate, and t is a term.

If you know linguistic syntax, it's easy to map t back to an NP (noun phrase, and thus (for prepositions P) get P(_,t). This shares one common structure in languages -- verbs. V(_,t) is also a frequent occurrence in languages (called "transitive verbs"). This should give a general reason why it's not so strange to do these things (in English and in Mandarin):

1. In English, we can treat many (and maybe all) transitive verbs as prepositions by using a progressive form V. Some are rather common: regarding, concerning, following, considering, and others.
   
2. In Mandarin, most prepositions map back to verbs. Or, really speaking, there properly aren't any prepositions in the language, just verbs that we (as English speakers with prepositions) would translate back to them. My experience with Mandarin is that prepositions are illusory. Instead, Mandarin prefers a "chronological approach," so the VP that we would translate to NP follow the expected chronology of the sentence. (e.g. 他住在城外三英里一所村子裡。He live be-at city be-outside three miles a residence village be-inside. The logical and chronological assumptions (of an SVO sentence) follow from left to right. English doesn't do that. trans. "He lives in a village [that is] three miles outside the city."