Fwd: The manner in which it was arrived

[Neal Whitman]

On NPR this morning, the interviewer was asking about the debt-ceiling deal, and asking about the significance of "the manner in which it was arrived".

The dropped/suppressed "at" is interesting. It's not a case of prepositional cannibalism (e.g. "calls will be answererd in the order that they are received [in]"), first of all because the prepositions are different, and second because the suppressed preposition can't be pied-piped (being a passive like "this bed hasn't been slept in"). My WAG is that the pied-piped "in which" at the beginning of the relative clause was enough to make *any* stranded preposition at the end sound bad to this speaker.

Neal Whitman

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