this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2023
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46
Is "to put something" grammatically correct? (programming.dev)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
24 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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[โ€“] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (3 children)

No for most people because "put" would require two complements - the object and the place. (It's a lot like a ditransitive verb, even not being one.) And in this case the place is missing, you'd expect it to be at most replaced with an adverb (e.g. "now I put the cheese there").

[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The exception I can think of as a native speaker is when the place is strongly implied. Like, "Now I put this..." and trail off, but it's obvious where I'm putting it because you're watching me put it somewhere that I've probably indicated multiple times already.

[โ€“] [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:

  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.
[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year 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?