Re: Dangling prepositions and phrasal verbs.

Andreas Johansson wrote:
>
> I've heard a disturbing number of Englishers claim that
> sentences like "I'm going out" are not kosher, on account
> of violating the ban on free-floating prepositions. Am I to
> understand that schools in the anglophone world do take
> the trouble to teach student not to end sentences with
> prepositions, but not to actually tell prepositions apart
> from the particles of phrasal verbs?!? Or are people
> just being selectively resistant to education?
When I was in school in the late 1960s, we were taught
that such sentences as "I'm going out" are okay because
"out" here is an adverb. (I don't think the teachers had
even heard the term "phrasal verb.") What we were
taught as prohibited are sentences such as "Whom do you
want to eat with?" since these could be rephrased as
"With whom do you want to eat?"

--Ph. D.