final prepositions (was: various)

[Mark A. Mandel]

Jim Landau  (I think) wrote:

>  The reason for the prescriptivist notion not "to end a sentence
> with a preposition" is not that prepositions are insignificant
> (they are not) but 1) Latin never ended sentences with prepositions
> (being case-inflected, it didn't use much in the way of
> prepositions---the "law" against split infinitives probably comes
> from the fact that in Latin it is physically impossible to split an
> infinitive so why should English be different?) and 2) (much more
> reasonable-sounding) it splits up the two parts of a phrasal verb,
> *allegedly* making the sentence harder to understand because the
> listener has to reassemble the verb phrase. (A terminal prepsition
> in an English sentence, as far as I can tell, is always part of a
> phrasal verb, never part of a prepositional phrase)  However,
> avoiding a terminal preposition can lead to such clumsy
> constructions that the listener would find it easier to understand
> the sentence with the terminal preposition.


 "Who did you donate the car to?"
 "What did you put the cat up in the tree for?"

Are you claiming that "donate to" and "put up in the tree for" are phrasal
verbs?

m a m

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