live

It is fine. (It isn't a sentence.) It is typical of casual, conversational English. As I keep telling you, Yoong Liat, the key is the CONTEXT.

"The place I live in" could be a room, house, street, area, suburb, district, village, or town, but not a county or state or large city I think.

"The place I live in is..." is fine.


So is "The place I live is..."

There may be some slight difference in connotation between the two, but if there is it's so small I'd be hard pressed to define it.

username, the phrase "The place I live is" is definitely non-grammatical and wrong.

Yoong Liat, I think you need to compose your questions more fully. Are you concerned about either of these?

1. The use of the word "place"

That rather vague word is capable of a number of interpretations (supplied by context) varying in locality, as I said before. A room, house, street, village or small town can be a "place", but not a wider area such as a city, province, state, county or country. More used in conversation or casual writing.

2. The placement of the preposition "in" after the verb?

Again, this marks the phrase as conversational, that is, acceptable in casual spoken English but not in formal written English. Maybe this is what you mean when you keep asking whether phrases or usages are "wrong"?

A more acceptable written version would be "the house/street/area/district/village/town where (or in which) I live"

Sorry, contrex, I disagree with you totally. "The place I live is..." is a completely proper first part of a sentence (not a phrase), as in "The place I live is a great bargain". "The place I live is the Italian Piedmont", "The place I live is a dump". It's probably more comprehensive than "live in..." because there's less connotation of scale. Google it. You'll get a lot of hits by apparent native English speakers who write in well-formed sentences. And usage counts in my book.

username, I see you just Googled for the phrase "the place I live" and chose the first few examples you saw (the Piedmont one for example).

I still say that you are mistaken.

You need to grasp the concept of a "phrasal verb". A phrasal verb is a combination of a verb and preposition, a verb and adverb, or a verb with both an adverb and preposition, any of which are part of the syntax (of the sentence), and so are a complete semantic unit.

The verb to live used in the way referred to in this thread is a phrasal verb and cannot stand alone as you seem to think. A quick Google will find examples of just about any mistake or error you can imagine.

Hi Contrex

I've not heard from you for a long time, and wondered why. Did you go for a holiday?

I agree with you that we cannot depend on Google for solution to our English problems.

I think 'in' is required in "The place/area I live in is infested with rats."

Best wishes.

Thanks, Contrex.

Nice to have you back. And I'm glad that you had a wonderful week in Spain (Barcelona).

Best wishes

No, Contrex, I googled "The place I live is", but Google, unlike some search engines doesn't respect the parenthesis limits, and I didn't use just the first several, because the way google works they didn't fit the parameter. While "the place I live in is" may be a phrasal verb, would you care to try to tell me why you think it is the only way to frame the sentence? "In" is in no sense always entailed by "live". As you have yourself mentioned, there seems to be a sense of size--a continent for example is so large that you probably just "live" there, you don't live "in" it--there is very little sense of enclosure. I would maintain that the "in" is optional on a smaller scale as well. And I am fully aware that you can find misuse easily on the web. You can also find examples that show that your particular usage may be more limited than what the other billion users of English would say.

Well, username, I would never say "I live Europe", or "I live Languedoc-Roussillon", because the verb "to live" in English is a phrasal verb. That is, one lives in a house, in or at a place, village or town, in a city or country, on an island, (although "in" an island is old fashioned BrE), over a shop, under a cloud, etc. Now do you understand what a phrasal verb is?

The relevant point in a phrasal verb is that the verb+preposition has a different meaning than either alone, which in a sense makes them an inseparable unit (even tho they can be positioned apart in the sentence). By the very meaning of "live" you are living "in" something. The body's got to be somewhere. The "in" doesn't really add anything you don't already know. If you live somewhere, you don't need the "in", (and that sentence is an example: I rather doubt you would say "If I live in somewhere....", yet we are certainly talking about location).

I used to drive my 10th grade English teacher crazy maintaining that the complete verb form in English in many idiomatic usages was in fact the verb plus the preposition. She maintained they were two separate things, not part of the same unit, but simply verb + prep, going by the old-school imposition of Latin grammatical forms on English, which they often didn't fit too well. "Phrasal verb", if it existed then, was not part of the standard grammatical-form lexicon. Good to see I was ahead of my time (tho I had gotten it from outside reading from descriptive grammarians as opposed to prescriptive grammarians--perhaps the two of us are butting into that still-simmering debate). However, it's now in use, but if you look at the online dictionaries of phrasal verbs, "live in" is not listed. You may say it's a phrasal verb, but others seem to disagree with you. Certainly in some sentences it may be more felicitious, but in others "live" works just as well as "live in" and, I would maintain, is consistent with common usage. There are several variations, obviously, of "live..." and to my ear the prepositionless usage is equally valid (depending of course on the form of the sentence).

Thus" The place where I live..., The place in which I live..., The place I live in is..., Where I live is..., The place I live is....

Further, go to dictionary.com and look up, say, "live up to" and "live in", which appear in their listings as phrasal verbs---BUT "live in" in the sense they use it is where someone lives at their place of work, as a maid who lives in, which is clearly not the sense yoong is using it, nor you, nor I. That sense is pretty clearly phrasal. yoong's isn't. It's optional, not required.

(Yoong, you'll notice, I trust, that this isn't an exact science we're dealing with here, and alliances are temporary. In this topic, contrex and I are in somewhat heated disagreement, while in another one of yours we're in league and ganging up on Mame).

(Which seems about par for the course. On any of your linguistic conundrums, two posters will agree, and the third will think the other two are full of crap. And it won't always be the same people. So take everything we tell you with a grain of salt--or perhaps the whole shakerful <except for me, of course, because everything I tell you is only god's unvarnished truth>).

I think we may be getting at cross purposes here. You can ask me "Where do you live?", I will answer "I live in France.", or "I live in Europe." I might add, "I used to live in England, where I was born". In each of my answers, the "in" is not optional.

True, but the syntax of the sentence is different.

Consider "England is the place I live". Would you really say "England is the place I live in"? I certainly wouldn't. It sounds stilted and redundant. And the final "in" adds nothing you don't already have in the sentence.

I think you're running on air, now, username!

No I wouldn't say "England is the place I live" but for different reasons. England is not a "place", it is a country, one of four that make up the United Kingdom.

I might say "Perpignan is the place/town where I live" or "Perpignan is the place/town I live in" or "Languedoc-Roussillon is the region I live in". I would never say "Perpignan is the place I live".

I would never point at my house and say "That is the place I live". It's not because I am stilted, but because it's wrong.