Description
Description
People have started to use odd combinations of prepositions, one on either side of "which", combined with a verb, often but not always a phrasal verb.
Prepositions come before nouns, that's what the "pre-" part means. When using "which" to refer to something where the noun would be, the prepositions comes before "which".
Phrasal verbs consist of a verb followed by a preposition, or multiple prepositions.
In reality some of the words people think of as prepositions in this position are actually adverbs, or have a prepositions sense and an adverb sense. In "put up with" "put" is the verb, "with" is only and always a preposition, and "up" is more commonly an adverb but is a bit fuzzy. Think "Jump up" vs "The cat is up a tree".
There's an ancient artificial rule brought over from latin proscribing prepositions at the end of sentences. But in natural English we do use these adverbs that are thought of as prepositions, or that have both functions, at the end of sentences. The grammatical strategy to avoid having a preposition at the end of a sentence is to move it to before "which". It works with real prepositions but not these "fuzzy" ones.
"The log I jumped over" -> "The log over which I jumped", but not "The boss I put up with" -> "The boss up with which I put".
As the proscription against sentence-final prepositions has been fading, people have been putting prepositions in both positions. Sometimes the same one in both places. Often the one at the end "sounds right" or is a common collocation with the verb:
- But if this ever-changing world in which we live in ...
But other times they're different and the one at the end is not even part of a common collocation, like the one I just heard in an Asianometry video:
- Even the battery - over which the two teams could not come to terms on.
This may be the same issue as #464 .
My impression is that it's most common with "of which" so I'm filing this one separately. If it turns out it can really be any pair of prepositions I'll merge the issues.
Resources
I'll add here if I find anything.
Examples
- Even the battery - over which the two teams could not come to terms on.
- ... in the rules-based system to which we all have um benefited and should continue to benefit from ...