Garden Variety Stranded Prepositions

[Drew Danielson]

I realize part of this association is due to my status as a
second-semester German student, but I see our language's Germanic roots
poking through.  In some cases at least, our stranded prepositions map
loosely to German's separable prefixes (though in a lot of cases the
words that my high school grammar teacher called 'stranded prepositions'
seemed a heck of a lot more like adverbs to me).

As dInIs alludes to, the garden variety stranded preposition is fairly
ubiquitous.  Although it is generally proscribed in proper English,
there appears to be a logical need for it in sentence construction.

Has ADS-L discussed this idea in the past?  Any other literature?  CSA
show two or three articles that look like the discuss this in the
context of English L1 speakers.



Laurence Horn wrote:
>
> At 8:35 AM -0500 3/22/02, 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.
>
> But the "gratuitous 'at'", as the article Drew Danielson cites calls
> it, of "where's it at?", is not your run of the mill garden variety
> stranded preposition.  Most stranded prepositions could alternatively
> be "pied-piped", to use the traditional Haj Rossian lingo:
>
> Who/What were you referring to?
> To who(m)/what were you referring?
>
> Which sheep are you sleeping with?
> With which sheep are you sleeping?
>
> Which drawer did I leave my false teeth in?
> In which drawer did I leave my false teeth?
>
> But such is not the case here:
>
> Where are my false teeth at?
> *At where are my false teeth?
>
> So it's not so much that the preposition "at" was left at the end of
> the sentence, it's why it was there in the first place.
>
> larry

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