Which sentence is correct?
What is special about the place you grew up?
What is special about the city you grew up in?
"What is special about the place you grew up?" sounds a bit ungrammatical to me, but is it how native speakers normally say?
grammarprepositions
Which sentence is correct?
What is special about the place you grew up?
What is special about the city you grew up in?
"What is special about the place you grew up?" sounds a bit ungrammatical to me, but is it how native speakers normally say?
Best Answer
Both are acceptable and common. In the version with in, the object of a preposition has been relativized; whereas in the version without in an adjunct of location has been relativized.
In fact, when searching in the iWEB corpus, only 21 out of 76 hits for 'the place I grew up' are followed by in, and most of the rest do not have a locative headed by around or other possible prepositions either.
A google ngrams search puts "the place I grew up." and "the place I grew up in" on about equal footing.
It's pretty well accepted that the relativized element can be equivalent to what would have to be a prepositional phrase if it were not relativized. From The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language p149, on relativized adjuncts:
The above are mostly understood as prepositional phrases:
The version without in is not, as has been suggested, mainly US usage. Examples of it are common in British English sources as well.