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universal preposition
- noun In most MUA input sentences, prepositions are
only present to separate the object and the instrument;
they don't have any other function apart from this purely syntactic
one. Therefore, players always tend to use the same preposition
whatever the circumstances, normally choosing the one that
is easiest to type. This is known as their universal preposition.
In MUD2, it's normally f,
although the parser does differentiate between prepositions
('get sand with coracle' and 'get sand from coracle' are two
different commands) so it doesn't always work as
planned. There is also
an 'excluding preposition' in MUD2, which indicates that the instrument is to be
excluded from the set of objects under consideration; this
gives rise to the unwieldy term universal excluding preposition.
See f, wi, x, b.
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