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.