I have been mentally reasoning this out since, seriously, my sophomore year of undergrad.

[dira]

(People with actual significant knowledge of syntax look away now.)

My sophomore year I took a syntax class where I sat next to thelionforreal and we wrote each other notes about popslash. We learned that syntax is like a machine for making chocolate chip cookies and yet I somehow got an A-.

My professor was a good descriptivist like most (probably all?) trained linguists, but all the same he assured me confidently that sentences ending in prepositions were ungrammatical--which meant, in his terms, not that they were incorrect according to some sort of style guide but that they would not be naturally generated by any speaker's internalized rules of language. They literally should not exist, and the fact that they did was evidently some sort of massive and ongoing series of errors in speech or writing.

I offered him an example, influenced by the construction that impeded my path back to my dorm that year. "That area is hard to get to." He appeared baffled and then dismissed the sentence, or possibly my argument, as either incomprehensible or imaginary.

Since then, I have thought a lot about the injustice of his position, and I have come to what is probably an obvious conclusion: there are a lot of sentences that appear to end in prepositions but really they don't. They end in words that look like prepositions that are really part of a verb or some other compound phrase.

Prepositions are words that indicate where something is in relation to something else: "the mouse is ______ the desk." Under, over, behind, below, before, beside, at, and so on. If I just said "The mouse is at" then you would presume I had trailed off in the middle of my thought. That would be a poorly formed sentence--something that I might say or write down for whatever reason, but which I would not mentally compose as a complete utterance. (My syntax professor was big on that point--few things people actually say or write are a good reflection of the syntactic process in their brains, he said, because of all the stammers and hesitations and half-repetitions and self-interruptions and so on.) "The mouse is at" would not arise naturally from my syntax as a complete thought--I would have to have thought "the mouse is at the desk" and then suffered some interruption or error en route to producing the actual words. That is an ungrammtical sentence in a linguistic sense. I would have to put a little asterisk next to it on my linguistics homework.

But if I say "the mouse is hard to get at" that is not what happened at all, because "get at" is a verb. It means something different from "get" + "at", and it is perfectly capable of occurring at the end of the sentence. You see what I'm getting at. For example. My suspicion is that the vast majority of sentences ending in "at" or "to" or "with" do so when those words are attached to verbs are perfectly coherent and thus, in linguistic terms, perfectly grammatical--and who gives a damn about Stunk & White and their attempt to make writing style in English conform to the structure of Latin anyway.

Uh. This pointless, pointless rant brought to you by one too many posts from Reasoning with Vampires, also available as reasoningwithvamps_feed. It's pretty entertaining, if a little strident on certain rules of usage.

Comments

[slybrarian]

I believe that this SMBC comic is relevant to your interests. Like many 'rules' of English, I suspect this one was made up because this structure doesn't occur in Latin even if it's perfectly sensible in everyday English. See also "Infinitives, Split," eg. "It is completely fine to fucking split infinitives, especially with adjectives."

[dira]

Yeah--I think the reason it rankled was that it wasn't a question about Correct Usage. My professor genuinely thought such sentences should not occur. And technically--if you define the prepositions people end sentences with (ha!) as parts of the verbs--then he was right, but he didn't explain that.

[ellen_fremedon]

...where did your professor study linguistics? Because I cannot imagine how a trained linguist would make that claim. If his pet theory of syntax didn't account for sentences like that, his pet theory was wrong.

(Also, yes, most of those verb + preposition units are in fact compound verbs in English. For even more fun, look up 'light verbs.')

[dira]

I don't remember where he studied, but he had to have someone else proctor our final so he could go give a talk at MIT. Mind you, I just googled him and Syntax does not appear as one of his specialties--he was teaching our class while on sabbatical as a favor to our department head, who was a friend of his. That ... probably had something to do with many of his more eccentric pedagogical practices. Like the time we got to class and he said "I'm not grading #3 on your homework, I realized after I gave it to you that you couldn't answer it correctly unless you had lunch with Noam Chomsky this week."

[fox]

... Okay, that's kind of awesome. :-)

[renenet]

♥

[dira]

*beams*

[missmollyetc]

They are rather pedantic, aren't they? I mean, Stephanie Meyer's prose actually does make me what to die inside at times, but the stuff Reasoning with Vampires has been coming up with for awhile is just erring on the side of prissiness.

Also, in other news, I love you. Also also, I wrote bad!fic and posted it. I know no fear! ::grins::

[dira]

Yeah, Reasoning with Vampires is fun as long as I don't take it too seriously. And yay for writing fic and posting it! \o/

[eledhwenlin]

First: you = ♥

Given that I can analyse sentences like the mouse is hard to get at completely fine with HPSG, I'm pretty sure that it is a perfectly grammatical sentence. Your prof was so full of shit. ;)

My syntax professor was big on that point--few things people actually say or write are a good reflection of the syntactic process in their brains, he said, because of all the stammers and hesitations and half-repetitions and self-interruptions and so on.

It's funny because pyscholinguists usually find exactly those things interesting as indicators what's happening in your brain.

I ... probably should have looked away, when you warned me. ;)

[dira]

Ah, well, none of the linguists I was thinking of when I typed that looked away, and yet none of you has defriended me for getting this completely wrong, so I will call it a win. :)

After I posted this I looked up my old professor, and Syntax doesn't seem to actually be one of his areas of specialty--he's a historical linguist--so I feel like that, and the fact that he was actually on his sabbatical and teaching our class as a favor to a friend, explain a lot of what went on in that class. Although, idk, maybe "Syntax is like a machine that makes chocolate chip cookies" is the standard way to explain it.

but what about

[(Anonymous)]

the house is where it's at. it's not unnatural, you want to emphasize the house part, is all.

Re: but what about

[dira]

Agreed!

[the_shoshanna]

You have heard -- haven't you? -- the one about the kid who didn't like the bedtime story the parent had chosen and brought upstairs, and demanded, "What did you bring that book I didn't want to be read to out of up for?"

[bbm-got-me-good.livejournal.com]

Well actually that's one point for the professor, that sentence sounds awful - you don't want to have sentences that sound like puzzles in your writing, except when it's intentionally humourous :P

[the_shoshanna]

Well, it's taken to an extreme -- but "What did you bring that for?" is certainly something I wouldn't hesitate to say (or write).

[bbm-got-me-good.livejournal.com]

Yes of course, I agree, especially that the alternative "What for did you bring that" hurts my ears. Is it really how he'd want it to be?

[dira]

It's definitely a joke/sentence that works much better out loud. I can hear the inflections break the sentence into coherent phrases, myself. In writing it's easier to get lost.

[bbm-got-me-good.livejournal.com]

Well ok, not being a native speaker, I always run out of breath somewhere in the middle of the string of prepositions, and ruin the whole thing :P But you can get away with anything in speech, it doesn't mean it's ok to write it down.

I'm not defending your professor's stance btw, it makes no sense at all.

[dira]

Well, no--in the written register that would be a terrible sentence. But as a joke demonstrating one of the amusing contortions of the English language, it mostly works. :)

[dira]

Ha! After I posted I wound up in chat with terrio trying to figure out that whole sentence. She got a three-preposition string, and then I remembered four and eventually five. *g*

[indywind]

Totally makes sense, and thank you for saving me from having to write out this explanation. Now I can just refer people here.

[dira]

Happy to help! Feel free to also send them to the LJ crosspost, where an actual grad student in syntax weighs in at some length. *g*

[walkingshadow]

My professor was a good descriptivist like most (probably all?) trained linguists, but all the same he assured me confidently that sentences ending in prepositions were ungrammatical . . . They literally should not exist, and the fact that they did was evidently some sort of massive and ongoing series of errors in speech or writing.

Okay, see, right there we have a major problem, because that professor cannot claim anything like that and ALSO claim to be a descriptivist (let alone a good one). Any usage that native speakers acknowledge to be grammatical (practically speaking, this means any common, agreed-upon usage among any group of speakers) IS grammatical, and linguistics have to figure out rules and theories that account for—i.e. DESCRIBE—those usages. By definition! And ending sentences with prepositions is something that native speakers of English do and have done for hundreds of years, so regularly and naturally that you were able to generate a perfectly ordinary and universally acceptable example on the spot. If that guy doesn't believe that, and if he doesn't believe that he himself ends sentences with prepositions every day of his life, he is either a liar or an idiot or both, and either way he's totally unqualified to comment on the grammaticality of any element of English. That's the kind of spurious myth I expect to hear regurgitated by misinformed self-fashioned grammar snobs on the internet, and it boggles my mind that it came from someone who was speaking as a voice of linguistic authority. And apparently makes me kind of angry!

I see other syntacticians here and in the crosspost have already tackled the issue of particle verbs, but if you want a quick history and a debunking of the whole no-final-prepositions rule (the short version is that John Dryden didn't like them, but he couldn't say why; and then he used them anyway), check out this post at Motivated Grammar, or the extremely awesome book Origins of the Specious, which has histories and debunkings of many more things!

[dira]

Yeah, I have decided to adopt my resident syntantician's assertion in the crosspost that the man must have been drunk (or else I completely misunderstood what he was saying at the time) because what the hell?