Preposition trouble

[rhu]

Over lunch with the kids, I was explaining how a "squirt dolphin" works. (It's a water pistol for parents who don't want to encourage gunplay.) I said:

It squirts water at whomever you aim it...

and then I froze. My pending-preposition-reference-count was non-zero and urged me to say "at," but my don't-end-a-sentence-with-a-preposition hemisphere said, "uh-uh, the place for that 'at' was four words ago." So I tried again:

It squirts water at at...

Ugh! I stopped right there. This isn't an ack-ack or an atlatl, it's an English sentence.

Forgetting about awkwardness, the grammatically correct structure would be

It squirts water at at whomever you aim it.

introverte says the second "at" should be elided and my original sentence, where I stopped it, would have been fine. This is clearly a problem only because both prepositions are the word "at". Compare:

It steals bananas from at whomever you aim it.
It squirts water at from whom you've stolen bananas.

So, ok, I recast the sentence completely:

It squirts water at the person at whom it's aimed.

and since I feel the passive voice is too often maligned, I'm satisified with this sentence --- but I still want to know if there's a deeper reason that "at at" feels wrong.

(WedNYT 7:08)

Comments

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

The correct way to say it is "It squirts water at whoever you aim it at."

OK, OK, not helpful. But I have to say, I find "It steals bananas from at whomever you aim it" and "It squirts water at from whom you've stolen bananas" to be gibberish, not English. So for me, this isn't a doubled-"at" problem; the problem is that "who(m)ever" is the object of the preposition in "shoots water at...".

What?, I hear you cry. Wrong! "Whomever" is the object of the preposition in "you aim it at..."! Well...yes. And no. For people like myself, who use "who(ever)" invariantly and never use "whomever", both of the following are fine.

I will marry whoever wins the race.
Whoever I marry will have her hands full.

But in some languages (I forget which--Greek, and perhaps others in the Balkan Sprachbund), in which case-marking is less residual and more robust, these sentences are no good: putting "whoever" in the nominative in the former and in the accusative in the latter doesn't help, apparently because the words themselves are also playing the other role in the main clause. Exception: if the relative pronoun is neuter, and thus if nominative and accusative have the same form, either structure is fine.

So I imagine that's what's happening here, in its own weird way: Introverte is accepting a single "at whomever" to do the work in both clauses, because the case (including the preposition) is the same in both clauses. And I think you're rejecting "at at whomever" because the first "at" really needs, somehow, that relative pronoun as its object. At least, it's a possibility.

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

I know you're anti-M (can't you just hear Dorothy calling for her anti-M) but I took your whom test and passed (I.e., "I will marry whoever wins the race" sounds fine to me) but thank you for bearing with me.

On rereading my original post, I find that my at/from examples read funny on paper, but when spoken, they work (at least for me). My guess it that's probably because there's a pause between the two prepositions, so the brain has a chance to hear the first one, prepare for a noun phrase, then process the entire second prepositional phrase as a unit.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Oh--that wasn't the test; I figured you'd like "I will marry whoever wins the race." I just expected that you wouldn't like "Whoever I marry...." The point being that these are no good in Greek, not in English.

[michelel72.livejournal.com]

I'm intrigued that you skipped straight over
It squirts water at the person at whom you aim it.
You were originally working in the second person, so the switch into passive voice doesn't seem necessary.

("[...] the passive voice is [...] maligned." Nice!)

Both banana examples sound not right to me, though. In my non-technical analysis, I think I'm not accustomed to seeing prepositions take prepositional phrases as objects.

Put another way, if you structure the sentence "incorrectly" so that it ends with the second preposition, both prepositions appear to "own" the same object (person) but the displacement makes that less obvious. Once you move both prepositions together, you seem to be missing an object -- at least as I read the sentence, because I expect both prepositions to take the noun as the object.

Keep in mind, though, that I find the "don't end with a preposition!" rule itself artificial and arbitrary. Many English-language verb phrases include terminal prepositions (such as Churchill's put up with example); even when that's not a factor, so long as all required elements are present, I see nothing worse about a terminal preposition than I do with the language's atypical do-query structure.

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

I'm not accustomed to seeing prepositions take prepositional phrases as objects.

I like this explanation.

[desireearmfeldt]

First I'll admit that I'm in the "no no, it's fine to end with a preposition" camp. That said, I think the bananna examples are wrong wrong wrong even if you accept that prepositions don't end sentences. Sadly, my one linguistics class was too long ago for me to actually dredge up the technical stuff I used to know... But let me try to think it out anyway.

It squirts water at her.

Subject Verb Direct-object Preposition Indirect-object.

For the indirect object, we can subsititute a single noun (with or without article): me, him, the girl, someone. Only the pronouns decline (shift case): it has to be "me" and not "I," but "the girl" is always "the girl." (Not true in a language that really does cases, like German or Latin. In German, the "the" of "the girl" would be different in "the girl squirts water" and "I squirt water at the girl.") Whom is a pronoun that declines--that's why it's "whom did you squirt water at?" and not "who did you squirt water at?"

But that indirect object can also be a *noun phrase*:
It squirts water at [the girl with the green shirt].
It squirts water at [the girl who sings soprano].

It's not "It squirts water at the girl *whom* sings soprano," because this is...oh, I'm gonna forget the name for th part of speech, but it's a noun phrase with its own subject and verb. You can chain further:
It squirts water at [the girl [who gave the cake to [the boy [whose father sings bass]]]].

So, what happens when we try to put what you wanted to say into this indirect-object black box? As suggested, you could say:
It squirts water at [the person at whom you aimed it].

But you want to use a "whoever" phrasing rather than a "the person who..." phrasing. "Whoever" declines, all right, so you have to say
You aimed it at whomever

But now you need that "whomever" to be the noun/subject of your noun phrase--because it's not "It squirts water at you aimed it at whoever". :) But "at whomever" is not a noun, it can't serve as a subject. "Whomever" has to do that. So either you have to say
It squirts water at [whomever you aimed it at]

and live with the dangling preposition, or... I don't think you have another option.

Because it's no better to say:
I will marry [at whom you aimed]
I love [at whom you aimed]

"At whom" just can't play the role of a noun, which you're asking it to do.

You can say
I love [the person [at whom you squirted water]]
It squirts water at [the person [at whom you aimed it]]

Because now "the person" is playing noun, with "at whom..." modifying "person."

[rubrick.livejournal.com]

This isn't an ack-ack or an atlatl, it's an English sentence.

Are you sure it's not an Imperial Walker?

My suggestion: "You aim it at someone, and it squirts water at them."

Hm, except that if you don't like ending sentences with propositions, you'd also probably insist on "him" rather than "them".

[angwantibo.livejournal.com]

This discussion is so you. "Had had" appears frequently in the English language and I always do a double-take whenever writing or speaking this phrase. Saying the same word more than once in a row without the intent of emphasis (e.g. much much much more) feels wrong. It probably fails an internal filter. Why would we have such an internal filter? Good questions. Amusing discussion.

[crossword-fiend.livejournal.com]

Totally late to the game, but...

The bright linguists at the blog Language Log are descriptivists, not prescriptivists. I do buy into their approach (and they don't abuse it by running around using "impact" as a verb), which in part says that you can go ahead and end a sentence or clause with a preposition, because (a) people have been doing so in speech and writing for some time, (b) it sounds fine, and (c) the meaning is utterly clear. Look what happened with all your contortions trying to avoid saying, "It squirts water at the person you aim it at." The kids could understand that, no? But all the attempts at reworking things just to avoid saying "at" at the end of the sentence—did those do anything at all to make the communication clearer? The goal should be clarity and communication, not blind adherence to Strunk and White's rules, which they may well have pulled out of their collective a**.