A question about English. Perhaps due to the influences that the German language has had on me, I often find myself placing the preposition of a phrasal verb at the end of the sentence - naturally, when it's not wrong to do so. E.g. "I had to set the complicated project up". This is all fine and dandy in most cases, but I realised just now that I'm not quite perfectly clear with how... er... prepositions operate with complicated sentences. Not only in phrasal verbs, but I've simply been applying similar logic (and my English in general has always been intuition first, explicit formality second) to prepositions in general.
So here's this convoluted sentence that I just posted elsewhere:
Lumоs said:
All the small children appear to have phones to play touchscreen minecraft all day long and call their mums five times an hour on.
Intuitively, the "on" is perfect where it is, since both fragments joined by the "union" (the "and" particle... what do we call the whole thing in English again?) require it. ["play <games>"/"call <someone>"] "on <the phone>". Great!
But what happens when we've got other fragments with other verbs (that require different prepositions) in the union? Off the top of my head, we can take "record videos" ("with <the phone>", though "on" also sounds acceptable) and "use" (doesn't require a preposition). How is the same sentence supposed to look like for different configurations of these?
1. X / PREP or PREP / X?
- "... phones to use and call their mums five times an hour on."
- "... phones to call their mums five times an hour on and use."
Both sound fine, but I'd go with the first one, because the preposition at the end sounds more sensible (as was previously established.
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The second one always sounds like it needs a "then" before the verb, or that the verb would fit better with "or" instead of "and" as the union. (The first verb I had in mind without a preposition was "dismantle" instead of "use", but that sounded very final, which means that it makes more sense to place it second... with a "then" before it.)
2. PREP1 / PREP2 - both?
- "... phones to call their mums five times an hour (on) and record ridiculous youtube videos with."
Switching them around appears to make no difference here. But we can't omit any of the proverbs, right? That would just be... wrong? Or could we skip the first one and let only the sentence-ending preposition stand?
Of course all of this assumes we ignore the "rule" that prepositions are not words to end a sentence with.