Proscription of Starting or Ending a Sentence with a Proposition - Assignment Example

There are several reasons behind the proscription of starting or ending a sentence with a proposition.

            One of the reasons why prepositions should not appear at a sentence’s initialmost position is that prepositions always appear after a noun or a pronoun. In most cases, nouns and pronouns perform the grammatical functions of the subject. Because of this, nouns and pronouns should appear at the beginning of a sentence (Lyons, 75).

            It is for this reason that it is grammatically correct to make sentences such as:

The Bishop of Rome is the head of the Roman Catholic Church.  

            In the above sentence, the noun phrases, the Bishop and the head precede the prepositions of.   

            Again, the same rules apply to the use of adjectives, since adjectives or adjectival phrases may also perform the grammatical function of a subject. Because of this, it is expedient to have a preposition or a prepositional phrase coming after the adjectival phrase functioning as the subject. It is for this reason that the sentence below may be correct.

Two of the Jewish feasts do not originate from the Torah.

            In the above sentence, the cardinal adjective, two precedes the prepositions of.  

            The converse of the foregoing is also true that in most cases, content words do not only serve as the subject, but also as the object. Since the object appears at the ultimate position of an active sentence, it is sound that a sentence is completed with a noun, a pronoun, or an adjective. For this reason, it may be grammatically correct to say:

Mary placed the flowers on the desk. The noun phrase the desk succeeds the preposition on to complete the sentence.  

Mark Antony and Cleopatra unknowingly died for each other. The reciprocal pronoun each other succeeds the preposition of to complete the sentence.

The apostles could not choose from the two. The adjectival phrase the two succeeds the preposition from to complete the sentence.

            On a different wavelength, Winston Churchill’s sentence: This is something up with which I will not put is wrong because it splits the to-infinitive. Prepositions are always combined with verbs to form the to-infinitive. Therefore, splitting the to-infinitive may make understanding the sentence difficult because it ignores the short dependency that the to-infinitive put-up should have