What is true of the extensive use of of is no less true of other prepositions,—at, by, from, in, on, to, with; while there are some whose use is much more limited,—across, after, before, up, toward.
The Prepositional Phrase used Adjectively.—We say of prepositional phrases that they are adjective or adverbial, according to what they modify—nouns, verbs, or adjectives. We have seen from the sentence quoted how freely the prepositional phrase may be joined to a noun, and how many different relations it may express. Let us see now what sentence-elements this adjective prepositional phrase takes the place of.
In the following sentence from Geikie,—“The stay of Jesus in Capernaum at this time was very short,” the phrase of Jesus takes the place of the possessive noun Jesus’s. It is better than the possessive here, not so much because this particular possessive is an awkward form as because stay is the more important word and should have the prominent place at the beginning of the sentence.
In Higginson’s sentence,—“Yet he has found readers at all periods alike among men of thought and men of action,” the phrases of thought and of action take the place of the adjectives thinking and active. But the adjectives, preceding their nouns, seem less important than the nouns; while the phrases, coming after the nouns, imply that the contrasted words thought and action contain the more important ideas.
In Boyesen’s sentence,—“According to Norwegian law at that time, every son of a king was entitled to his share of the kingdom,” the phrase at that time is a substitute for the clause, which was operative at that time; but it is preferable, not only for brevity, but because it makes the modifier less prominent,—it is not forced upon the reader’s attention as it would be by a subject and predicate.
We may well repeat here what was said in one of our first chapters, that several different elements may be exact equivalents before they are in a sentence, but as soon as we desire to make use of one of them for the communication of thought, they are not equivalent—one of them will almost invariably serve our turn better than the other. Thinking men, men of thought, men who think are identical in meaning, but in a sentence the special setting of these expressions, the accompanying ideas, will determine which most clearly and precisely conveys our meaning and should therefore be used.
Besides modifying a noun, the adjective prepositional phrase may complete an intransitive verb; as, “My march was of long duration.”—Audubon. “All these writers are of a revolutionary cast.”—De Quincey. “All the floors in Venice are of stone.”—Howells. In sentences like these the phrase denotes an attribute of the subject. It is usually employed because there is no adjective that expresses so well the precise meaning.
The adjective long, if used in the first sentence quoted, would imply that the march was long in space, in miles traversed, but the phrase means only that it consumed much time.
The adjective revolutionary, if used in the second sentence, might be interpreted to mean that the writers belong to a revolutionary period, or that they are decidedly in favor of revolution; but the phrase means only that they have a leaning toward revolutionary ideas.
In the third sentence the noun stone used adjectively would be to the general reader an exact equivalent of the phrase of stone.