Unlike verbs, nouns and adjectives, adpositions form a relatively small and more or less closed class, in the sense that the set of adpositions can be listed almost exhaustively; cf. Section 32.2. Nevertheless, it should be noted that it is not entirely impossible to introduce new adpositions into the language; we refer the reader to Section 32.2.1, where we discuss a number of relatively recent cases.

While verbs are inflected for tense and agree with the subject of the clause in person and number, nouns are inflected for number and adjectives are inflected in attributive position, there is no inflection of adpositions in Dutch: adpositions like inin or onderunder have the same form in all syntactic environments. The property of invariance applies only to inflection; derivation and compounding are possible.

There are two exceptions to the general rule that the form of adpositions is invariant. The first concerns the prepositions metwith and totuntil, which change to mee and toe when R-extraction has applied: er ... mee/toe; cf. Chapter 36. The second is the preposition te, which can appear as ter or ten in certain fixed expressions like ter wereld brengento give birth to and ten aanzien vanwith respect to. In this case we are dealing with historical relics, because the forms ter and ten must be seen as fused forms of the preposition te and the case-marked determiners der and den, just as German zum is the fused form of the preposition zuto and the dative determiner demthe. In fact, the form ten aanzien van can be seen as a phrasal (i.e. lexicalized) preposition; cf. 32.2.1 for discussion.

Adpositions typically take a noun phrase as their complement, to which they assign non-nominative case. In present-day German, adpositions differ in whether they assign genitive, dative or accusative case. In Dutch, on the other hand, the case assigned by the adposition cannot be determined due to the lack of morphological case; the form of noun phrases like de jongen and het meisje in the primeless examples in (2) remains the same in all conceivable syntactic positions (subject, object, or complement of an adposition). But that adpositions do assign non-nominative case is clear from the fact, illustrated in the primed examples, that they cannot be followed by the nominative forms of the personal pronouns.

Adpositions usually express a relation between their complement and some other entity in the clause. In the examples in (2), for instance, the adpositions naast and voor express a spatial relation between their nominal complement of the preposition, i.e. de jongen/het meisje, and the subject of the clause Jan.

Spatial and temporal adpositional phrases can be pronominalized. For instance, example (3) shows that the spatial adpositional phrase in Amsterdam can be replaced by the adpositional pro-form erthere.

The spatial pro-form er is referential: it refers to a place familiar to the speaker and the addressee. Table 2 provides an overview of the other spatial pro-forms, which are generally referred to as R-words because they all contain the sound /r/. Note that the classification of spatial pro-forms in this table is virtually identical to the classification of pronouns given in Section .

The referential pro-forms er and daar differ in the same way as the weak and strong referential pronouns: er is unaccented whereas daar is accented. This is illustrated in the primed examples in (4) by means of topicalization, which is only possible with accented phrases.

Since Table 2 shows that daar can also be used as a demonstrative pro-form, example (4b) is in fact ambiguous: daar can be interpreted referentially, referring to a place known to the speaker and the addressee, or it can have demonstrative force.

There are three temporal adpositional pro-forms, which differ in that they refer to different points in time: toenthen in (5a) refers to a point in time before the actual speech time; danthen in (5b) refers to a point in time after the speech time; nunow in (5c) refers to the speech time itself, and can be seen as the pro-form corresponding to an adpositional phrase such as op dit momentat this moment. Note in passing that dan (but not toen) can also be used in (5c); this is due to the fact that the simple present can have a future interpretation in Dutch (cf. Section V1.5.1 for discussion).

The complement of an adposition can also often be replaced by an R-word, a phenomenon to which we will refer to as R-pronominalization. An example with the referential R-word er is given in (6b). The other R-words in Table 2 can also be used in this function; this is shown in (6b') for the proximate demonstrative hierhere. For a detailed discussion of R-pronominalization, see Chapter 36.

Like clauses, but unlike nominal and adjectival phrases, adpositional phrases can often follow the verbs in clause-final position without the need of a comma-intonation. This phenomenon, which is often referred to as PP-over-V, is illustrated in (7) by means of an adverbial manner phrase.

Example (8a) further shows that attributively used PPs are placed in postnominal position. In this respect, they differ from attributively used APs, such as aardige in (8b), which usually occur prenominally; cf. Section .

Modification by the adverbial phrases vlak or palright seems to be restricted to (a subset of) spatial and temporal PPs.

In order to enter the XP met ...! construction, XP must be directional in nature. Since directions are typically expressed by adverbs and adpositional phrases, they are used in the prototypical case. Adjectival phrases such as dood in (10c) cannot easily enter the construction, despite the fact that we are dealing with a change of state.

Many adpositions may or may not receive stress depending on the complement they take. If they select a referential noun phrase or a strong pronoun, stress is generally assigned to the complement (although in contrastive contexts, stress may also be assigned to the adposition). However, if the complement is a weak pronoun, stress is assigned to the adposition itself. In the examples in (11), the stressed syllable/word is indicated in small caps.

However, some non-spatial adpositions require a stressed complement, and thus cannot take a weak pronoun as their complement. Note that this has nothing to do with the stress properties of the adposition itself: both the spatial adposition tegenagainst and the non-spatial adposition namenson behalf of receive stress on the first syllable, but only the former can to take a weak pronoun as its complement.

Other adpositions that behave like namens are dankzijthanks to, ondanksdespite, vanwegebecause of, volgensaccording to and wegensbecause of. Some non-spatial adpositions that do allow a weak pronoun as their complement are metwith, vanof and zonderwithout. See Sections 36.1 and 36.2 for a more detailed discussion of pronominal complements of adpositions.

For the sake of completeness, it should be noted that whether or not a preposition can take a weak pronoun as its complement may also depend on other factors. For example, the PP met me in (11a'') is possible when it is part of a sentence, as in (13a), but not if it is used as an independent utterance in response to the question Met wie heeft ze gisteren gedanst? in (13b).

The fact that the answer to the question in (13b) requires the presence of a non-pronominal noun phrase or a strong pronoun is probably due to the fact that the complement of the preposition conveys the new/requested information, and therefore needs to be accented. Support for this proposal comes from the fact that the PP naast me in (11b'') can be used in the question-answer pair in (14a), where the full PP counts as new information, but not in the question-answer pair in (14b), in which it is only the complement of the preposition naast that counts as new information.