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From: ntt@dciem.UUCP (Mark Brader)
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Subject: Re: For what is grammar good? - (nf)
Message-ID: <859@dciem.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 17-Apr-84 13:23:16 EST
Article-I.D.: dciem.859
Posted: Tue Apr 17 13:23:16 1984
Date-Received: Tue, 17-Apr-84 16:23:04 EST
References: <1631@mit-eddie.UUCP>
Organization: NTT Systems Inc., Toronto, Canada
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Randwulf (Randy Haskins, mit-eddie!rh) says:
	"Put up with" is, abstractly, a verb (all three words make up the
	verb unit).  ...  When you say "That is something I won't put up
	with", *I* don't think you are ending the sentence with a preposition.

Well, *I* do.  "With" is a preposition, whose object is "something"--
or to be exact, the implied "that" that follows "something".  And "up", of
course, is an adverb.  As somebody said, the whole issue only arises
because early grammarians tried to adopt Latin rules in English, and in Latin
a PREposition always precedes its object (hence the name).  In English it
doesn't, and that's all there is to it.

What "put up with" is is an *idiom*.  Yes, it is "abstractly a verb", but it
isn't necessary to treat it as a single verb to parse the sentence.  It's just
like in C, where "for (foo=0; foo<N; foo++)" is an idiom, which you may read
as a single "chunk", but it can still be parsed as a general "for" statement.

What restaurant do you like to eat at?  You can't say that "eat at" is an
idiom; it conveys simply the meaning of "eat"+"at".  As proof of this, you
could rearrange the sentence with "at" at the beginning.  But normally you
wouldn't.  The form given seems more natural--to me, anyway.

How about killing this topic now?  I don't think there's much more to say.

Mark Brader