I'm in Yon Fogarty and this week I have a piece by CYL Graves.

And now onto the meaty middle.

Today's episode is about parts of speech in the interesting gray area between prepositions

and adverbs.

Let's start with the help section of the grammar girl grammar pop game, which has this rule

about labeling parts of speech.

Quote, sometimes, word you might think of as prepositions act like adverbs.

When a word such as over or up is modifying a verb, it's acting like an adverb.

But in grammar pop we still call it a preposition.

Grammar pop calls the words up and over in the following sentences, prepositions.

She needed to speak up.

The statue tipped over.

It's the difference between what something is and what something does.

It's a preposition doing a job that's typically associated with adverbs.

Rational people can disagree about this because it's a gray area of grammar, unquote.

As a reminder, you may have learned that prepositions are little words like up, over,

or with that express time, direction, and spatial relationships.

While adverbs modify verbs, adjectives, and other adverbs, and even entire sentences.

The prepositions up and over in these examples are also a type of preposition called particles,

but that's the topic for a future episode.

This decision to go with what a word is instead of by what it does is interesting because

it's unusual.

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