Abstract
This chapter presents the main properties of the prepositional phrase, a syntactic unit formed by a preposition and its complement. It begins with a description of the structure of the prepositional phrase, the syntactic functions that it can perform in the sentence, and the units than can head it, that is, the prepositions of Spanish. The main theoretical questions raised by the study of the preposition and prepositional phrase, a syntactic unit not explicitly recognized as such until the twentieth century, are then reviewed: the traditional conception of the preposition, its meaning, the endocentric or exocentric character of the prepositional phrase, and the main questions regarding the delimitation of prepositions. Another section reviews some of the main issues addressed in current work on this class of syntactic units: phrasal prepositions and other phrasal units formed on the basis of a prepositional phrase, as well as dialectal variation associated with prepositions and prepositional phrases. The chapter concludes by presenting our view of the main future lines of research in relation to prepositions and the prepositional phrase.
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