Talk:lest

Why is the word lest a preposition? Isn't it a disjunctive conjunction? 188.162.166.18 (talk) 20:12, 18 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The categories used here are those from the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. There, they explain why, following Otto Jespersen's justification from 1924, most so called "subordinating conjunctions" are actually prepositions. In brief the argument is that many categories take a variety of complements. Verbs, for example, can be intrasitive, transitive, or ditransitive. They can take a variety of prepositional or clausal complements. Regardless of the complement they take, they're still verbs. Why then insist that prepositions can take only NP object complements? Lest then is a preposition that takes a clausal complement.--Brett (talk) 11:36, 19 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]