I’ll preface this by saying that English is not my mother language and I’m sorry if this isn’t the right community, but I didn’t find a more appropriate one.
Last year I started to notice more and more people on YouTube for example using the verb “to put” without a preposition – like “Now I put the cheese” – which sounds very weird and kind of feels wrong to me. Is this really used in spoken English and is it grammatically correct?
Caveat lector: I’m not a native speaker, so take what I’m saying with a grain of salt.
This exception seems to be a case of right-edge deletion - you’re generating the sentence as if you were to utter the adverbial/prepositional complement, but then you chop the sentence just before the element. This can be shown by the following:
- I put some flowers on the table. // OK, complete sentence. Typically including a falling tone near the end.
- I put some flowers… // “on the table” is on the right edge, so it can be deleted.
- I put some flowers on the table for decoration. // OK
- [?] I put some flowers for decoration. // Weird, probably agrammatical.
