Sometimes a preposition is associated with a verb or verbal in such a way as not to require an object. Such a construction is usually passive or infinitive; for example, “I was going to say something about our boarders the other day, when I got run away with by my local reminiscences.”—Holmes. “Those who are still in a state to require being taken care of by others must be protected against their own actions as well as against external injury.”—Mill. “One child in a household of grown people is usually made very much of, and in a quiet way I was a good deal taken notice of by Mrs. Bretton.”—Brontë.
Prepositions so used may sometimes be considered as adverbs, as in the expressions, money to do with, firesides to sit at; but oftener it is impossible to separate them from the verb-phrase or verbal-phrase of which they form a part. They help to express the one notion denoted by a whole group of words and have not the function of any part of speech.
Peculiar Prepositions.—Some words originally participles have a use so much resembling that of prepositions that they are no longer thought of as verbals, but have come to be considered prepositions. Some of these are regarding, concerning, during, excepting; as, “Our judgments concerning the worth of things, big or little, depend on the feelings the things arouse in us.”—Wm. James.
Some combinations of words, like as to, out of, instead of, according to, owing to, are now regarded as single prepositions. They express a single relation, and often one word may be substituted for them; as, “You drive a gambler out of the gambling room who loads dice.”—Ruskin. “The Prince of Orange had not been consulted as to the formation of the league.”—Motley.
Is “Like” a Preposition?—It is not uncommon to find both verbs and nouns taking as an adjunct a phrase introduced by like; for example,
“That hand was cold, a frozen thing,—it dropped from his like lead.”—Mrs. Hemans.
“Now and then he would see a thin fin, like a big shark’s fin, drifting along close to shore.”—Kipling.
In such a phrase there is always a substantive, and if this is changed to a personal pronoun we find that it is in the objective case; for example, “A writer is so like a lover.”—Holmes. Substituting a pronoun for lover we find that usage calls for the objective form him. Does this prove that like is a preposition and him its object?
There is authority in dictionaries and grammars for calling like a preposition, and this is certainly both simple and convenient; but sometimes it leads us into difficulties. In the sentence,—“He walks more like a soldier than a priest,” shall we say that the preposition like is compared? In the sentence,—“It is very like a whale,” shall we say that the preposition like is modified by the adverb very, a word that we expect to modify only adjectives and adverbs? In the sentence,—“Like to an angel of peace she seemed that day,” how shall we dispose of to if we call like a preposition governing angel?
If we go back to the writings of Milton and Shakespeare, we find the words liker and likest, showing plainly that in their time like was looked upon as an adjective or adverb. We often find, too, the preposition to or unto expressed after like. It is best, therefore, to dispose of like as an adjective, meaning similar, when it introduces a phrase modifying a noun or completing a verb; and as an adverb, when the phrase modifies a verb. It will then be necessary to supply the preposition to or unto.