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Is "to put something" grammatically correct? (self.asklemmy)

submitted 1 year ago by gentooer to c/[email protected]

23 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I'll preface this by saying that English is not my mother language and I'm sorry if this isn't the right community, but I didn't find a more appropriate one.

Last year I started to notice more and more people on YouTube for example using the verb "to put" without a preposition -- like "Now I put the cheese" -- which sounds very weird and kind of feels wrong to me. Is this really used in spoken English and is it grammatically correct?

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Caveat lector: I'm not a native speaker, so take what I'm saying with a grain of salt.

This exception seems to be a case of right-edge deletion - you're generating the sentence as if you were to utter the adverbial/prepositional complement, but then you chop the sentence just before the element. This can be shown by the following:

I put some flowers on the table. // OK, complete sentence. Typically including a falling tone near the end.
I put some flowers... // "on the table" is on the right edge, so it can be deleted.
I put some flowers on the table for decoration. // OK
[?] I put some flowers for decoration. // Weird, probably agrammatical.