Final prepositions again
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In "Prepositionssss…" (9/2/2011), we quoted from the 1995 Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage,
Members of the never-end-a-sentence-with-a-preposition school are still with us and are not reluctant to make themselves known…
This follows M-W's note that
…recent commentators — at least since Fowler 1926 — are unanimous in their rejection of the notion that ending a sentence with a preposition is an error or an offense against propriety. Fowler terms the idea a "cherished superstition."
And that same 2011 post ends with a list of links discussing the superstition's origin and progress, going back to John Dryden's 1672 attempt to demonstrate that "he is a better poet and playwright than Jonson, Fletcher and Shakespeare were".
Today I observed this superstition rising again from the grave.
Wikipedia tells us that James Fallows, among many other things, was Jimmy Carter's speechwriter, and it's apparently in that role that he footnotes a sentence from a recent Facebook commentary by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse:
That is the prize on which we must keep our eyes.
In his essay "Why I changed my mind", Fallows offers a transcript of Whitehouse's remarks, and footnotes that sentence:
Minor speechwriting note: This preceding sentence is grammatically correct. But the “on which” part makes it tricky in delivery. Our ears expect to hear “the prize we must keep our eyes on,” no matter what the grammarians might say.
If Sheldon Whitehouse were just speaking off the cuff, he (like nearly all of the rest of us) would naturally end this sentence with a preposition. “We must keep our eyes on.” But apparently he was working from a script, and you could see him trying to make “on which” sound natural as he came across it. With a scripted speech, you can either write your way around the problem—“our eyes must never leave that prize”—or you can have the speaker rehearse the line several times, until the “on which” construction starts to sound natural.
It's interesting that someone like Fallows thinks that "grammarians" endorse the superstition about phrase-final prepositions. In part, this reinforces the deprecative interpretation of the word grammarian, discussed in this post a year ago. But it also shows that some linguistic zombie-hunting is still needed.
Philip Taylor said,
November 17, 2025 @ 9:09 am
I would agree that ending an (English) sentence with a preposition breaks no grammatical rule. But I nonetheless find "That is the prize on which we must keep our eyes" infinitely more pleasing to the ear than "That is the prize we must keep our eyes on" — the latter grates (for me), the former does not.
Laura Morland said,
November 17, 2025 @ 9:29 am
What Philip Taylor said.
Speaking not as a "prescriptivist grammarian," but as someone who trains amateurs in public speaking: ideally you want to conclude a sentence with a strong word. Speaking from a lectern, I would prefer to proclaim (emphasis over-emphasized, since "all caps" are our only option here):
"THAT is the PRIZE on which WE must KEEP our EYES." (And then make eye contact with a few in the audience.)
Ending that sentence with "on" would render it much less effective.
Mark Liberman said,
November 17, 2025 @ 10:33 am
@Philip Taylor and Laura Morland:
The sentence "That is the prize on which we must keep our eyes" is inappropriately pompous and formal-sounding for (most people's) everyday speech. Which is why James Fallows suggests that "the speaker rehearse the line several times, until the 'on which' construction starts to sound natural."
The point of my post, however, was not the relative popularity or contextual appropriateness of the PP-fronted and P-stranded versions, but rather Fallows' suggestion that "grammarians" would object to the P-stranded version. That Zombie Rule has been explicitly rejected by essentially all (real) grammarians and usage experts for a century or more — but people like Fallows still think that such a "rule" has substance, and Philip has internalized it in his inventory of peeves.
J.W. Brewer said,
November 17, 2025 @ 10:55 am
A further problem is that Whitehouse's speechwriter is trying to rearrange a well-known and thus idiomatic phrase "keep your eyes on the prize," which became well-known because of its use in a song (a "Negro spiritual," as the genre was once standardly known) that became associated with the early-Sixties Civil Rights movement. Understandably given the genre, the register is not only non-pompous but perhaps a bit colloquial: "Paul and Silas bound in jail / Had no money for to go their bail / Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on."
As it happens that's a variant of an older spiritual known by various titles including "Gospel Plow," which was just recorded in a new version by the elderly English rock star Robert Plant,* who starts it with "Matthew, Mark, Luke and John / All them prophets dead and gone / Keep your hand on the plow, hold on." I would respectfully submit that anyone who is tempted to rework that as "the plow on which your hand should be kept" is committing worse literary sins than pomposity.
Obviously the "on" in "hold on" can be labeled an adverb rather than preposition, but it's a perfectly strong word to end a line on.
*Plant's version is actually titled "Gospel Plough," which seems to reflect a variant spelling prevalent in his native Worcestershire.
Philip Anderson said,
November 17, 2025 @ 11:15 am
“Plough” is just the normal British English spelling of the word, not one peculiar to Worcestershire.
Stephen Goranson said,
November 17, 2025 @ 12:06 pm
Laura Morland advised "ideally you want to conclude a sentence with a strong word."
Admittedly, ending a sentence with a strong word can be a way to be emphatic.
Sometimes. But that effect, when overdone, can peter out.
For example, by that advice, would it always be preferable to write:
"ideally you want to conclude a sentence with a word that is strong"?
Buzz79 said,
November 17, 2025 @ 12:10 pm
I've got to say that the first thing I thought of when I read the Fallows post was the line attributed to Churchill when advised not to end a sentence with a preposition – "That is the sort of nonsense up with which I will not put." If I were re-writing the line (and I definitely would) it would be "That is the real prize and we must keep our eyes on the prize."
AntC said,
November 17, 2025 @ 2:42 pm
What myl said.
Also 'eyes' rhymes with 'prize' — presumably why it's in the spiritual. The pompous phrase puts too many unstressed syllables between the two, so destroying the scansion.
Also topic-comment aka theme-rheme information structure.
RfP said,
November 17, 2025 @ 4:29 pm
@Laura Morland
Bearing in mind Mark’s clarification about the point of this post, I wonder why English developed the “trailing preposition” in the first place.
Could it be due to our variable stress? And our (concomitant?) penchant for punchy sentences?
Since the compact nature of everyday English seemingly contributes to many of its own specific styles of pungency—as opposed to the pungency of, say, fluent French—could this be one of the pathways of that development?
On that note, I don’t really agree with what you (Laura Morland) said about the preference for concluding “a sentence with a strong word.” (Chiming in more or less with AntC’s comment about scansion, which I read just as I was about to post this.)
Yes, it can be correct to say that—but only under the right circumstances. Such as in “Keep your EYES on the PRIZE,” a double anapest whose semantics dictate that the sentence must not only end with a strong word, but with the strongest one in the sentence.
But this dictum isn’t universal, because semantics and prosody often have the last word.
“THAT is the PRIZE on which WE must KEEP our EYES” dilutes the semantic and (therefore?) the prosodic force of this sentence, by attenuating the emphasis on “THAT” and “PRIZE.” (With, as AntC points out, too many blankety-blank unstressed syllables.)
That is, it seems to me that it’s crucial semantically to emphasize the things we MUST “keep our eyes on” and that the prosody has to follow suit.
To put the emphasis of the sentence where it belongs—on what’s most important—I think it’s better to phrase it like this:
“THAT is the PRIZE we must KEEP our EYES on.” (Dactyl, dactyl, trochee, trochee)
With THAT and PRIZE getting heavy emphasis in the first part of the sentence, setting up the ultimate force of the KEEP (which is the strongest syllable).
Or, even more colloquially, “THAT’S the PRIZE we MUST keep our EYES on.” (Trochaic tetrameter FTW!)
In this last one, MUST rightfully replaces KEEP, and has an even stronger connection to the emphatic beginning of the sentence.
RfP said,
November 17, 2025 @ 4:35 pm
P.S. I just realized that my scanning of “THAT is the PRIZE we must KEEP our EYES on” as dactyl, dactyl, trochee, trochee is probably inferior to scanning it as this:
“THAT is the PRIZE we MUST keep our EYES on.” (Dactyl, trochee, dactyl, trochee)
Which seems to me to have pretty much the same prosodic force as “THAT’S the PRIZE we MUST keep our EYES on.”
Michael Watts said,
November 17, 2025 @ 4:55 pm
What's to wonder? The trailing preposition doesn't end the sentence. It's followed by a gap. But since gaps have no realization, we call the preposition the end of the sentence.
What's going on is that in some sense nouns that occur within a prepositional phrase may be manipulated in the same way as nouns that don't. There's an example of a closely related construction in CGEL:
This glass has been drunk from.
But we can't analyze this one in terms of a gap left by a relativizer. Here, the verb is in the passive voice, but instead of the active verb's direct object becoming the subject of the passive verb, an indirect prepositionally-marked object has become the subject.
We might ask how much of a grammatical distinction really exists between English prepositions and the particles looking very much like prepositions that occur in separable verbs ("throw away" / "pick up" / etc). In many ways the distinction is clear — we can't, for example, say "I drank the glass from". But in this way they behave identically. And it's very common for speakers naming a verb that takes a conventional prepositionally-marked object to include the preposition as part of the verb.
David Morris said,
November 17, 2025 @ 5:08 pm
There are very strong rules about. We can't end just any sentence with.
Julian said,
November 17, 2025 @ 5:46 pm
@Laura Morland
Yes in principle to your point, but not sure that it's significant in practice in this case.
The lexical item we want to emphasise is the whole idiom 'keep your eyes on', not just the word 'eyes'.
In the stranded version, the final preposition is unstressed, and arguably does not distract too much from the core words of the idiom. It only takes a second to parse the intended meaning.
In the pedantic version, the desired rhetorical emphasis on the final word is arguably vitiated by the likelihood that we're distracted because we're still trying (subconsciously of course, over fractions of a second) to work out the syntax of the whole unnaturally complicated sentence.
Genuine question: if the sentence was 'That's the prize we must aim for', would you still prefer 'That's the prize for which we must aim'?
JPL said,
November 17, 2025 @ 6:02 pm
What about, "THAT is the PRIZE on which our EYES must be KEPT"? Given stress timing, that could have a good rhythm. And it ends with the image of what must be DONE.
Jonathan Smith said,
November 17, 2025 @ 6:19 pm
* CJK (etc.) "relative clause" + head version:
"That is the we-must-keep-our-eyes-on prize" (or "…eyes-on-it prize" if capturing Chinese-style treatment of object of PP)
* Knowwhat we're making this relative clause a sentence version (skip unless you want to start hearing it everywhere… on the plus side, no final PP)
"That is the prize which we must keep our eyes on it"
* grammarian ophthalmologist version:
"That is the ice on which we must keep our eyes"
J.W. Brewer said,
November 17, 2025 @ 8:56 pm
The NP "strong word" used by Laura Morland doesn't seem to me to have any real fixed meaning in common use, although I suppose I can't exclude the possibility that it does in her vocational niche. Maybe it has to do with prosody, maybe with amount of semantic content, maybe those two in tandem, or maybe some third thing.
Checking google books turns up Marvin Richardson Vincent's 1887 work _Word Studies in the New Testament_, which in discussing Luke 5:14 characterizes παρήγγειλεν as a "strong word." But that's nowhere near the end of the sentence in which it occurs. In context it just seems to mean that the choice of verb (rendered "charged" in the KJV) shows that Jesus is giving something like an order or command to the cleansed leper, rather than merely making a suggestion.
J.W. Brewer said,
November 17, 2025 @ 9:06 pm
Separately (perhaps), a line of poetry ending "eyes on" would have a "feminine" ending in traditional jargon, because concluding with an unstressed rather than stressed syllable. But wikipedia is eager to reassure us that "The terms masculine ending and feminine ending are not based on any cultural concept of masculinity or femininity." In any event I should hope we don't think that feminine endings, typically trochees, are presumptively "weak" rather than "strong."
AntC said,
November 17, 2025 @ 9:51 pm
Posters here might be shocked to learn final prepositions are being perpetrated even as we speak. From the programme to today's lunchtime concert. (The biog is presumably supplied by the performer; then you might rail against the yoof of today not learning proper English. OTOH if he shows the promise I heard, he'll soon be needing an agent, that can write his publicity.):
For bonus points you can comment on the Oxford comma; and the semicolon which seems uncalled for(?)
I can't find any reorganisation of that sentence (which is already rather long) that avoids the dangling preposition without sounding clunky.
Andreas Johansson said,
November 18, 2025 @ 2:28 am
If I understand correctly, feminine and masculine endings are so called simply because back when final -e was still normally sounded in French, feminine nouns generally had an unstressed syllable after the stressed ones and masculines generally not.
Philip Taylor said,
November 18, 2025 @ 4:00 am
Ant — "I can't find any reorganisation of that sentence (which is already rather long) that avoids the dangling preposition without sounding clunky" — I would propose :
And assuming that "agent" in your own prose is a human agent, not an AI one, I would re-cast your "OTOH if he shows the promise I heard, he'll soon be needing an agent, that can write his publicity.):" as :