Learn English – Are the phrases “both in water and land” and “for the loss and damage to” grammatical

ellipsisgrammarprepositionssyntactic-analysis

I have asked this question in a linguistics forum, but as I was not getting answers I decided to ask it here.

A. Consider the phrase that is boldfaced in sentence (1):

  1. "It can live both in water and land."

Is the phrase grammatical as it is, with no preposition before "land"? Or should the phrase be "both in water and on land"?

B. Now consider the phrase that is boldfaced in sentence (2):

  1. "He is responsible for the loss and damage to the article."

In the phrase grammatical as it is, with no preposition after "loss"? Or should the phrase be "loss of and damage to"?

Best Answer

"It can live both in water and land."

A good trick I use for these types of situations is to imagine it says: "It can live both in water and in land" since that's basically what you're saying. For this you need to add "and on land." Otherwise you're saying it can live in land as well.

"He is responsible for the loss and damage to the article."

For this sentence, use the same trick I said for the previous sentence: "He is responsible for the loss to the article and damage to the article." The phrase "loss to the article" doesn't seem to have the meaning you were going for, so again I'd say add "loss of."

Related Topic