I happened to see recently this sign posted at the main entrance of a retirement community: Dogs Are Allowed with Leashes. Straightforward enough, but the phrase with leashes brings up an observation or two about prepositional phrases and how they work.
A preposition is a word that shows some kind of relation between things. The term relation is notoriously difficult to grasp, but if we understand it to mean the way in which something is connected to something else, we’ll have a good basic understanding. The term thing should cause us less trouble, because the minute we take our attention seriously, we realize we’re thinking about things. Some things make themselves known through one or more of our five senses, things like a dog or a leash. In language, we name things with nouns, and sensory things like these are called concrete nouns. But we also think about things that are not sensorial or material, like freedom or anxiety, security or love. We know such things exist, some even move our hearts and call our aspirations, but we can only find them as things in our minds. The philosophers call them ideas, the grammarians call them abstract nouns.
So when we say that a preposition shows some kind of relation between things, the term things means the preposition will be working with a noun (or any element acting as a noun), whether concrete or abstract. And in fact so closely does a preposition work with a noun, that there’s never a preposition without one. In the sentence we’re looking at, for example, the word with is the preposition, and the noun connected to it is the plural leashes. Every preposition, therefore, must have at least one object, and the two together, preposition and prepositional object, form a prepositional phrase (in our example, with leashes).
But to speak of a connection or a relation between things, we must have at least two things. Leashes, the prepositional object, is one of them, but what are those leashes connected to? In our example, it’s the noun dogs, and so the preposition with is there to establish some connection between those two things. And here’s where the going gets a little tough, because things can be related in very obvious ways, but also in ways more subtle. At first bark, dogs allowed with leashes means that those dogs have a leash with them. The preposition with is connecting the dogs and the leashes through the idea of accompaniment, in the very same way we say here’s a jar with a lid, or I’m taking a trip this summer with friends: the lid accompanies, or goes with, the jar, just as the friends will accompany me on my trip.
Accompaniment is the obvious way the preposition with is connecting the things dogs and leashes in the sentence. But is simply saying what is allowed—dogs with leashes—the strongest way to construct what amounts to a sign of warning and stipulation? We all get what the sign means, and we all come to understand that if we show up with a dog, it better have a leash twined securely around its neck. But isn’t there a way to write just that and save the reader the effort (unconscious though it may be) of realizing that accompaniment is not the point, but condition, or state, is? That retirement community didn’t just want dogs to have a leash with them; it wanted dogs with leashes on them. With that closer thinking in mind, we might now revise the sign to read Dogs Are Allowed on Leashes.
But, alas, that won’t do either, because where we’ve placed the prepositional phrase on leashes ends up making it work as an adverb modifying the participle allowed (a problem that plagued the original statement as well). By the quick magic of transposition, though, we can find a way through: Dogs on Leashes Are Allowed. Now the prepositional phrase, no longer an adverb, becomes an adjective modifying dogs, pointing clearly to the only condition of the dogs which the retirement community will allow.
Now about all that barking.
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