[bloak]

It's more like a preposition that exceptionally comes after the noun phrase instead of before it. (Is there another thing like that in English? I can't think of one, though there's one in German: entlang)

Etymologically it's a past participle: three days agone (gone) => three days ago

[thaumasiotes]

> It's more like a preposition that exceptionally comes after the noun phrase instead of before it. (Is there another thing like that in English? I can't think of one, though there's one in German: entlang)

There are some similar constructions:

- Three days hence. (archaic)

- Three days later.

- Three days beforehand.

- Three days afterwards.

I failed to think of one that didn't have to do with time.

You could think of "three days later" as being supposed to have a complement supplied to later, as in "three days later [than that]", but interestingly enough this isn't possible for "beforehand" or "afterwards".

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postscript: I think this can be conflated with a general syntactic possibility in English. I can describe an establishment as being "one floor up" from some other contextually-determined establishment, or, as with later, I can make that relationship explicit by saying "one floor up from [wherever]". This is also similar to the bog-standard measurement construction that gets you phrases like "three feet tall".

[Angostura]

I like your antipenultimate example

[thaumasiotes]

Three days later? What about it?

[bradrn]

> It's more like a preposition that exceptionally comes after the noun phrase instead of before it.

Called a ‘postposition’. And that’s precisely what ‘ago’ is!

[thaumasiotes]

The nonjudgmental term of art appears to be "adposition". It isn't clear to me why this was coined as "adposition" and not "apposition".

"Preposition" is already something of an unnatural word class. They have two main functions in English: to describe some kind of location ("Sam? He's with Natasha"), and to mark certain arguments to verbs ("The tools? Sam's playing with them").

It's just a coincidence that prepositions serve both of these purposes in English; in Mandarin, the same two purposes are served by completely separate word classes. Verb argument markers are preposed; location markers are postposed.

[bradrn]

> It's just a coincidence that prepositions serve both of these purposes in English

Not really… these categories fall together in a lot of languages. It doesn’t even require prepositions: a lot of languages have case markers which can be used for both location and verbal arguments.

The specific examples you’ve given are, respectively, called the ‘comitative’ and ‘instrumental’ uses of with. These two categories are particularly prone to falling together, mostly because the boundaries between them aren’t particularly clear: for instance, if you say, I made the coffee with milk, you could say that the coffee is accompanied by the milk (comitative), but you could also say that you’re using the milk (instrumental).