does the japanese language have prepositional phrases?

Question

I was in my linguistic anthropology class and we were discussing the discriptive properties of languages (english was what we had positive knowledge about and during that this question had popped up) anyway, my professer would like to know if there is any language, currently known by the way, that doesn't have prepositional phrases (I myself would primarily like to know about japanese though). Any help on the "topic" of this question (mainly about japanese, but the other question in the "details" here would also be appreciated) would be nice.

Answer 1

Fred is wrong. About half of the world's languages have prepositional phrases (like English), the other half have postpositional phrases (like Japanese). There are no languages without adpositional phrases because the ability to express the complex adverbial relationships dealing with location and movement is fundamental to language. Sometimes adpositions are affixed to the nominal, sometimes they are affixed to the verb, and sometimes they are independent words, but in any case, they are still fundamentally adpositions and, together with the nominals they modify, they form adpositional phrases.

Answer 2

Japanese is sometimes analyzed as having postpositional phrases.

There might be languages without adpositional phrases, I don't know. You could ask a linguist:
http://linguistlist.org/ask-ling/search-ask-ling.html

Answer 3

Very few languages of the world have prepositional phrases. Japanese does not. Japanese has postpostional phrases.