"at" at end of sentence

[Drew Danielson]

This 'at' was documented in the context of Pittsburghese, in Bloom, Si,
"Every One Talks Funny But Us", The Pittsburgher, August 1977, v. 1, no.
3, pp. 39-40, 79.  The discussion included, among a zillion other
ostensibly 'Pittsburghese' features, a mention of the '"gratuitous at,"
as in, "where's he at?" not "where's he?"'.  Also included is the
"gratuitous of" - "He's not too good of a bowler" (granted this is not
the same grammatically, but it's another example of a unneeded
preposition used in this dialect region).


"Dennis R. Preston" wrote:
>
> Hardly Midwestern US. I have yet to visit an English-speaking part of
> the world where many prepositions were not left at the ends of
> sentences. I suspect there are some lower-level syntactic conditions
> which will obtain in some areas and not in others (causing Canadians,
> for example, to notice others' use but not their own, a common enough
> sociolinguistic phenomenon [or 'phenomena', a rapidly-growing
> singular]), but I don't think we know about the distribution of these
> conditions, and I suspect that many are more social than geographic.
>
> Good thesis. Get on it.
>
> dInIs
>
> >Many of my friends in Indiana use the sentence-ending "at," so I suspect
> >it's more of a midwest thing.
> >
> >Paul
> >
> >>  You know you're from Ohio if:
> >>
> >>  You end your sentences with an unnecessary
> >>  preposition. Example:"Where's my coat at?"
> >>
> >>  I'd always thought this was American in general (ie., Canadians
> >>  never put "at" at the end of sentences, but it's one of
> >>  the first things we notice when we go south of the border).
> >>
> >>  Is this usage considered specific to Ohio or that general region?
>
> --
> Dennis R. Preston
> Professor of Linguistics
> Department of Linguistics and Languages
> 740 Wells Hall A
> Michigan State University
> East Lansing, MI 48824-1027 USA
> Office - (517) 353-0740
> Fax - (517) 432-2736

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