QT 19 – Video Transcript and Bonus Info
Welcome to Part 2 of prepositions. Our last QuickTake ended with a cliffhanger, right there in the post office! Was the man right? Did the post office employees need grammar lessons? Should it have been “Please turn off your cell phone,” or was the sign correct, “Please turn your cell phone off”? And what did Toolhouse Rock Cate do to quell the mass hysteria that ensured?
“Excuse me, sir,” Cate said, hiding behind her package. “There is no such rule. It’s perfectly fine to end a sentence with a preposition.” The man stared aghast. Folks craned their necks to listen. “More to the point,” Cate continued, “the word ‘off’ isn’t even a preposition here. It’s a particle.”
“A what ?”
That’s right, a particle—a small word that looks like a preposition, acts like an adverb, but is attached to a verb. These verb-particle combinations create phrasal verbs, for example:
Bring up, drop off, check in, look up, run into, listen in, and turn off, as in turn off your cell phone.
So all that hullabaloo in the post office over a preposition at the end of the sentence? That wasn’t even a preposition!
In other instances, what look like prepositions might be adverbs. Check out these three uses of “off”:
He grabbed the book off the shelf. (preposition)
The crook took off at the sound of the alarm. (particle)
The train was a long way off. (adverb)
That takes us to the Hokey Pokey! Bet you’ve never minded the “prepositions” at the end. Wait. Are those prepositions? Or are they particles, part of the verb? Or maybe adverbs?
You put your right foot in
You put your right foot out
You put your right foot in
Then you shake it all about
You do the hokey pokey
Then you turn yourself around
That’s what it’s all about
If only I’d sung that in the post office! What kind of looks would I have gotten then?
The rest of the story:
The answer to the Hokey Pokey song is that the italicized words are not prepositions, not particles, but adverbs!
Another tricky construction involves the word “to.” Often “to” functions as a preposition, as in “I walked to the store.” Prepositions begin prepositional phrases. Here the prepositional phrase is “to the store.” But the word “to” can also begin a verb phrase called an infinitive, as in “Dilly likes to sing.” How do you think the word “to” is functioning in this next sentence?
Dilly will sing as long as he wants to.
That man in the post office would no doubt announce loudly that “to” is a preposition, violating the rule that isn’t. But in this case, “to” begins an unstated infinitive:
Dilly will sing as long as he wants [to sing].
To wrap up: There is no rule against ending sentences with prepositions. Some words that look like prepositions are particles, forming a phrasal verb, and the word “to” if followed by a verb is not a preposition, but an infinitive.
Who knew going to the post office could be so educational!