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
    23•1 year ago

    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”).

    • booty [he/him]English
      4•1 year ago

      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.

      • Lvxferre
        8•1 year 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.