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?

  • Lvxferre
    8•8 months ago

    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:

    1. I put some flowers on the table. // OK, complete sentence. Typically including a falling tone near the end.
    2. I put some flowers… // “on the table” is on the right edge, so it can be deleted.
    3. I put some flowers on the table for decoration. // OK
    4. [?] I put some flowers for decoration. // Weird, probably agrammatical.
    • mintyfrogEnglish
      1•8 months ago

      Native English speaker here. Option 4 “sounds” more acceptable than 2. Maybe it’s because you can more easily imply where the flowers are?