Preposition

In grammar, a preposition is a type of adposition, a grammatical particle that establishes a relationship between an object (usually a noun phrase) and some other part of the sentence, often expressing a location in place or time.

English prescriptive guidelines

In English usage, prescriptivists often argue that, since prepositions are usually meant to come before the words they modify, one should not end a sentence with a preposition. This guideline stems from the pre-20th century belief that Latin is a perfect language, since it never changes. Latin was the literary language among English speakers in the Middle Ages, and Church Latin remains the language of the Catholic Church to this day. In Latin, prepositions always immediately precede the nouns they modify, thus never appearing at the end of a sentence.

Related Topics:
Prescriptivists - 20th century - Latin - Literary language - Middle Ages - Church Latin - Catholic Church

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The reason Latin does not change, however, is that there are no more native speakers. When Latin was an active language, it changed over time just like any other language. Furthermore, Latin is a heavily inflected language, while Modern English relies primarily on word order to convey grammatical meaning.1 As a result, English has far more prepositions than Latin. Latin does not need as many prepositions because its larger number of cases supplement prepositions in their function of conveying grammatical meaning. These realizations have come relatively recently by descriptive linguistics.

Related Topics:
Inflected language - Modern English - Word order - 1 - Cases - Descriptive linguistics

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Following this prescriptivist guideline can frequently make a sentence become unnecessarily complicated. For example, compare "The table I'd like to sit at", with "The table at which I'd like to sit". To most English speakers, the former sounds more natural, while the latter sounds stilted and overly formal. "The table where I'd like to sit" is one possible compromise between these two options, and should avoid offending those who prefer sentences not to end in prepositions.

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Winston Churchill is said to have received a memo, clumsily phrased to avoid ending sentences with prepositions, and to have put in the margin the parody: "This is the sort of nonsense up with which I shall not put!"

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Morris Bishop contrived a poem whose final sentence ends with no fewer than seven prepositions in a row:

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I lately lost a preposition

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It hid, I thought, beneath my chair

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And angrily I cried, "Perdition!

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Up from out of in under there."

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Correctness is my vade mecum,

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And straggling phrases I abhor,

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And yet I wondered, "What should he come

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Up from out of in under for?"

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A common reaction to the issue can be phrased as "What did you bring this subject which I'm not interested in up for"?

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Many other Germanic languages, such as German, employ separable prefix verbs in which a prefix (usually adopted from a preposition) modifies a verb. The prefix frequently appears separate from the verb at the end of the sentence. For instance, "arrive" in German is "ankommen" (literally the word "to" prefixed to the word "come"). A sentence that uses this verb in any form other than as an infinitive, however, will put the "an" at the end of the sentence: "Die Frau kommt um 7 Uhr in Köln an." (Literally: "The woman comes at seven o'clock in Cologne to."; Idiomatically: "The woman arrives in Cologne at seven o'clock.") Some grammarians hold that English prepositions at the ends of sentences are related to this Germanic usage, and therefore natural parts of the English language. But, it should be noted that separable prefixes are not prepositions and do not generally modify or introduce prepositional clauses.

Related Topics:
Germanic languages - German

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Also note that some English sentences that appear to be ending with a preposition are really ending with an adverb. In the sentence "The cat jumped up", up is not a preposition, but an adverb or particle.

Related Topics:
Adverb - Particle

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