Sunday, July 17, 2016

Is "when" a preposition?

I had to come up with an "edit-the-mistakes" worksheet for a Special Education student on-the-fly. One of my offerings was this sentence:





When I was three years old I can tie my shoes.




I had intended the correction to be this sentence:




When I was three-years-old, I could tie my shoes.




I know that my sentence correction is stylistically weak; however, I believe it is grammatically correct. A coworker "corrected" me in front of my student saying that it did not need a comma, but my thought was that "when" is being used as a preposition. My question is this: is the phrase "When I was three-years-old" a prepositional phrase? I looked at a number of prepositional word lists online and "when" does not appear on any of them.

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