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Can I End a Sentence in a Preposition? 515 Views
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Want even more deets on ending a sentence with a preposition? Take a look at our entire grammar section for all the goods.
Transcript
- 00:04
Can I End a Sentence in a Preposition? a la Shmoop
- 00:07
You hear it every morning. You put on your robe, exit your cloistered chambers, greet
- 00:11
the day with barely-open eyes… and then ask the bishop, “Where is the goat at?”
- 00:16
And he always responds in that superior tone of his, “He’s probably in school, learning
- 00:20
how to properly construct a sentence.”
Full Transcript
- 00:23
That bishop can be a real pain sometimes.
- 00:25
All you want to do is milk a goat to make some yogurt. You don’t want a grammar lesson.
- 00:29
So, while flagellating yourself in your chambers, you ask the heavens, “Can I end a sentence
- 00:34
in a preposition?”
- 00:35
<<booming, God voice>> YES.
- 00:37
Okay. It’s not quite so simple. There are always exceptions.
- 00:40
First, what the H-E-double hockey sticks is a preposition?
- 00:43
A preposition is a word that creates a relationship between two words, usually having to do with
- 00:49
space or direction, or time.
- 00:52
For example, The goat went over the fence.
- 00:55
Over is the preposition, telling what direction the goat went in relation to the fence.
- 01:01
Another example is: I saw the goat before lunch.
- 01:05
Before is the preposition, telling when in time the goat was seen.
- 01:11
Almost all of the time, a preposition needs an object.
- 01:13
You can’t say: I saw the goat before.
- 01:15
Before what? Before breakfast? Before the apocalypse?
- 01:20
However, you don’t need an object if the object is self-explanatory or is elsewhere
- 01:27
in the sentence.
- 01:28
For example: What did I just step in?
- 01:31
If you want to get picky, the one-hundred-percent grammatically correct way to say this is “In
- 01:38
what did I just step?”
- 01:40
But no one, not even monks, talk like that. So it’s okay to say “What did I step in?”
- 01:44
to avoid sounding snooty or pedantic.
- 01:47
Basically, If there’s no other way to word it without sounding like a person from another
- 01:52
century, it’s a-ok.
- 01:55
So is it okay to end a sentence with a preposition?
- 01:58
Or should we say, what kind of prepositions can you end a sentence with?
- 02:03
A preposition always needs an object.
- 02:05
But the object can be elsewhere in the sentence, not just after the preposition.
- 02:10
If it sounds better with the preposition at the end, then it’s totally fine to do so.
- 02:15
And you can tell the bishop that, if he has a problem with it, he can talk to US.
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