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I've discovered something that bothers me even more than when people use the infamous "plural apostrophe"; preposition dropping. I didn't start noticing this until fairly recently, and it seems to be becoming more and more common at a very rapid pace, especially in the Midwest and on the West coast. I don't notice it as much in the Southeast. It seems to be especially common to drop "to be" from phrases. The trash no longer "needs to be taken out", it simply "needs taken out". What!? UGH.
I think needs taken out is a corruption of needs taking out:
The trash needs taking out. The stew needs stirring.
I've discovered something that bothers me even more than when people use the infamous "plural apostrophe"; preposition dropping. I didn't start noticing this until fairly recently, and it seems to be becoming more and more common at a very rapid pace, especially in the Midwest and on the West coast. I don't notice it as much in the Southeast. It seems to be especially common to drop "to be" from phrases. The trash no longer "needs to be taken out", it simply "needs taken out". What!? UGH.
Your example does not describe preposition dropping.
In the sentence, "The trash needs to be taken out.", the word 'to' is not a preposition, but a grammatical particle serving as an infinitive marker.
Dropping the supplementary particle appears in both American and British regional dialects but is considered non-standard, if not outright ungrammatical.
Dropping a preposition can be seen in a sentence such as, "Have you written [to] your mother?", where the preposition 'to', marked in brackets, would be ommited before the word 'mother'.
This construction, once common to most dialects of English, has fallen out of favor among British grammarians, but is still considered correct in American dialects.
DOH! Sorry about the mislabeling. I am not that experienced with linguistics, even though I find it very interesting. The phenomenon I described is what bothers me though. Thank you for the gentle correction! What would that be called? infinitive marker dropping?
Last edited by Lunar Delta; 08-22-2014 at 05:47 PM..
A mistake I see/hear a lot is to breath instead of to breathe. Gets on my nerves each time.
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