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From: steiny@scc.UUCP (Don Steiny)
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Subject: Re: Re: Being taken care of. (prepositions)
Message-ID: <483@scc.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 1-Apr-85 11:11:58 EST
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Posted: Mon Apr  1 11:11:58 1985
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>
> The technical name for those things that look like prepositions but
> are actually part of the verb is PARTICLES.
> Confusing?  Sometimes it gets worse; you can have two verbs-cum-
> particles  with different meanings but the same spellings.
> For instance, take PUT-UP-WITH (meaning to tolerate) and compare it
> to PUT-UP-WITH (to nail to the all by means of).
> 
> I had one Linguistics professor who claimed that indeed you shouldn't end
> a sentence with a preposition--and that no native English speaker was
> capable of constructing a sentence that would do so.
> 
> --Lee Gold

	The sentences:

	1) He ran up the bill.
	2) He ran up the hill.

	are simple examples of sentences that are similar in surface
structure, but the "up"'s are different.  One is a particle and the
other is a prepositions (which is a special type of particle).  We
can say:

	3) He ran the bill up.

but

	4) *He ran the hill up.

is ungrammatical.  The differences in "up" can be defined by the
way that they can move in clauses.  

	The question of ending a sentence with a preposition is
not relevant in #3, because the sentence does not end with a preposition.

	Most people say:

	5) What were you talking about?

and not:

	6) About what were you talking?

The reason a linguistics professor would contend that English speakers
do not end a sentence with a prepostion is that the professor
was making a distinction between "deep" structure and
"surface" structure.  "Deep structure" is a highly abstract
representation, like flow charts of a computer program that
could be implemented in any language.  The surface structure
is like the written out program in some language.  It is not
the binary itself, but it is a more detailed description of
what the binary is like than the flow chart.  In speech
#5 is much more natural that #6.  However this does not 
contradict the assertion that English speakers do not
end sentences with prepositions.  

	At the *deep* level, sentence #5 is generated as:

	7) You were talking about what.

	and it is transformed into #5 by moving the noun phrase ("what")
to the beginning of the sentence and switching the positions of the 
noun and verb (according to one explanation).  Therefore, "what"
is the object of the preposition and the sentence does not
end with a preposition in "deep" structure, yet, after the
"transformation" into #5, the "surface" structure, it does.  

	The rule of prescriptive grammar is that the whole prepositional
phrase must be moved to the front instead of the object.  Though I
do not know the specific rule the rule almost certainly came from
Latin and is not a rule of English at all.  

	
-- 
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