Dr Winford James
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A Preposition at the End of the Sentence?
You Gotta Be Joking! - Part 2

By Dr. Winford James
May 01, 2005
Posted: May 09, 2005


A Preposition at the End of the Sentence? You Gotta Be Joking! - Part 1

Things that have become a part of you are notoriously difficult to get rid of (or, if you prefer, 'It is notoriously difficult to get rid of things that have become a part of you'). This is why religious people find it so hard to change some of their beliefs or practices when they have seen another light, and why so many parents are traumatised when they have to let go of their adult children, and why grown men and women hold on to the grammatical dogmas they have been fed by authoritarian but ignorant teachers. The prohibition against sentence-ending prepositions is one of those dogmas.

Ask almost anybody why they insist that sentences must not end with prepositions, and the best reason they will come up with (or, if you prefer, 'with which they will come up') is that that is what they have been taught. But if you can defend a position only by reference to the fact that your teacher said so, then you couldn't be ready for serious debate. Received dogma is a sad little basis for intellectual engagement; you are likely to be reduced to inane self-repetition.

The matter of placement of prepositions in English is a complex one, and I began to show this in my column last Sunday. I relied on the structure of sentences like the following where the preposition can only come at the end:

1a. Lucky got shouted AT and spat ON.
2a. You speak to Panday since I find him so difficult to speak TO.
3a. The topic wasn't worth speaking ON.

These are normal, natural sentences in the speech of both those who know English natively and those who do not. If they are used by native speakers, then they must be grammatical(ly correct). But those who prescribe against them can only stipulate, in the fashion of prescriptivists, that they are instances of informal usage and so must not be used in formal speech or writing, especially the latter. Rather than accepting the sentences as they are, they prefer to paraphrase them into safer, uncontroversial ones.

But their usual ruse is to move the preposition from its offensive end-place to the front of (the relevant part of) the sentence where it will unite with a noun, a pronoun, or a noun phrase to become a prepositional phrase. But though the ruse works with many kinds of sentences which end with prepositions, it fails with others. It fails with the sentences in 1a-3a. As I showed last Sunday, we simply can't move the preposition frontward; to do so will result in ungrammatical sentences. Let me deepen the analysis a bit.

When a sentence ends with a preposition, we may say that the preposition is stranded - in the sense that it does not have its complement (that is, a noun, a pronoun, or a noun phrase) in front of it to lean on (or, if you prefer, 'on which to lean'). Examples of prepositions with complements they lean on are: 'on Lucky', 'to Panday', 'on the topic', and 'over the man', where 'Lucky', 'Panday', 'the topic', and 'the man' are complements, and each entire unit is a prepositional phrase, so-called because a preposition begins or heads it. Our prescriptivist will (attempt to) move the preposition in 1a-3a to the position in front of its complement so as not strand it, but she will end up producing nonsensical sentences, as in 1b-3b:

1b. [AT Lucky] got shouted and ON Lucky got spat.
2b. You speak to Panday since I find [TO him] so difficult to speak.
3b. [ON the topic] wasn't worth speaking.

Why are the sentences ungrammatical even though the prepositions are united with their complements? Well, for at least two reasons. Re 1b and 3b, the movement of the prepositions 'at' and 'on' to the position in the sentence before 'Lucky' and 'the topic' robs the sentences of a noun / noun phrase and, therefore, of a subject. English sentences must have subjects (whether these are spelt out or understood to be silently there), but these subjects have to be nouns or pronouns or noun phrases and NOT prepositional phrases.

Re 2b, English permits description of nouns / pronouns / noun phrases by adjectives (as in 'him so difficult' where the adjective 'difficult' describes the object pronoun 'him') but does not permit description of prepositional phrases, which is why the description of the prepositional phrase 'to him' by 'difficult' is odd.

So, it should be clearer now why prepositions can come sentence-finally - indeed, MUST come there in certain sentences. In our example sentences, they must come there to allow their complements to function ALSO as subjects of the sentences. But how, you might ask, could a subject be a complement if it is not right there in front of the preposition at the end of the sentence?

Brace yourself for the answer! Because the complement has to do duty in a high-profile position (at the front of the sentence!), it leaves a silent (that is, unpronounced) copy of itself when it moves, which copy blocks any other complement from occurring there! (Neat, isn't it?) Which would mean that the kind of sentence in which it has this silent copy is derived from another kind of sentence in which it remains in its default place, that is, after the preposition. So that 1a ('Lucky got shouted AT and spat ON') has a silent copy of 'Lucky' after both 'AT' and 'ON'; and the sentence itself is derived from something like 'Somebody shouted AT and spat ON Lucky', where 'Lucky' holds its default position after the prepositions.

As I said, the matter is more complex than our bogus little prescription suggests!



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