Prepositions and adverbs

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1

Someone wrote:

Some words can be used as either prepositions or adverbs. If the word has an object, it is acting as a preposition. If it has no object, it is acting as an adverb.

Adverb: My school bus just went past.
Preposition: My brother just drove past us.
Hint:Ask what after the word to see if it has an object.

Adverb: My school bus just went past. (Past what? Nothing = Adverb)
Preposition: My brother just drove past us. (Past what? Us = Preposition)

Do you feel the following sentence is strange? Do you notice any important difference in meaning? No emphasis on the word “past”? (I imagine no emphasis is put on the word because it is a preposition.)

My school bus just went past us.

I don’t know the difference between stress, accent, and emphasis. I wonder if the expression “(putting) emphasis on the word”, which I used above, is correct.

(Edited.)

2

What’s the problem here?
In fact, some words can be used as either prepositions or adverbs.

But not all prepositions can be also adverbs, for example: in, at, up, on, for etc.
At the same time such prepositions turn into verbal particles used with verbs to make phrasal verbs: make up, look for, set in etc.

However: he came inside the room (prep)
Look inside! (adv)
Maybe, the examples with ‘past’ were not very good, but we can make up some other ones:
I began to drive past the houses (prep)
It is half past three (prep)
two weeks went past quickly (adv)

The prepositions are without stress, and we can stress on some adverbs when they are important in the phrase, but not always.

Now about these words ‘stress, accent, emphasis’ - in some meanings they are quite differenrt, in other meanings they can have the same meaning.
In the linguistics we use such an expression as ‘word stress’ = emphasis given to a particular syllable of the word through a combination of relatively loudness, higher pitch and longer duration, for example: The stress in French words falls on the last syllable.

‘An accent’ can mean just ‘a pronunciation’, but also ‘the elevation of the voice which distinguish one words from another’.
We can say about ‘tonic accent’ in Chinese and ‘sillable accent’ in the most European languages.
We can say also ‘phrasal accent’ in English.

‘Emphasis’ is a special stress given to a word when speaking because the speaker would like to pay attention to this word, we can use the expression ‘emphasis mine’.
Maybe, that’s all about these words.

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3

Thank you, evgueny40.

  1. My school bus just went past.
  2. My brother just drove past us.
  3. My school bus just went past us.
  4. My brother just drove past.

My point is why the writer did not use a set of 1 and 3 or a set of 2 and 4 in order to explain the difference between the preposition and the adverb, if 3 and 4 make sense.

4

My school bus just went past us.

You don’t really need the ‘us’. Unless you specify another object, it’s pretty obvious that ‘just went past’ means ‘just went past me/us’.

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