 As in other Celtic languages, Scottish Gaelic expresses modality and psych-verbals (such as ""like"", ""prefer"", ""be able to"", ""manage to"", ""must""/""have to"", ""make""=""compel to"") by periphrastic constructions involving various adjectives, prepositional phrases and the copula or another verb, some of which involve highly unusual syntactic patterns when compared to English.Prepositions in Gaelic govern either the nominative, dative (prepositional), or genitive case.All so-called "compound prepositions" consist of a simple preposition and a noun, and therefore the word they refer to is in the genitive case