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Sentence 1: A person with whom I am particularly close has moved away.

Sentence 2: A person I am particularly close with has moved away.

What are some differences between these two sentences that are worth highlighting? Sentence 1 sounds fine to me, but I am not completely convinced it is a good sentence.

livresque
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user1923
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    Both are acceptable, although "close to" sounds more natural than "close with" to me. The first is quite formal and wouldn't tend to be used in common speech these days. – ralph.m Jun 08 '23 at 23:43
  • @Barmar: I think you mean sentence *2* is the one breaking the "rule" (the noun phrase ends with preposition "with"). But although the rule is complete tosh, OP's second version is definitely not favoured by Anglophones in general. And I don't like "with" anyway, but even with my preferred preposition "to", it's still an also-ran compared to the first construction. – FumbleFingers Jun 08 '23 at 23:55
  • @Barmar is FumbleFingers correct? – user1923 Jun 08 '23 at 23:56
  • @peanut. forget "rules". just look at the usage chart. – FumbleFingers Jun 08 '23 at 23:58
  • @FumbleFingers That's what I was trying to say. Pedants say that 1 is correct and 2 is violating the rule. They're wrong. – Barmar Jun 09 '23 at 00:01
  • close with (like close to) should stay together (so Sentence 2 is best). More at https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2014/08/close-encounters.html – Tinfoil Hat Jun 09 '23 at 02:39
  • @Barmar: I completely agree with you that that "rule" is pedantic nonsense (it's one half of what makes some people say To whom am I speaking? on the telephone instead of Who am I speaking to?) .... – FumbleFingers Jun 09 '23 at 10:19
  • ... Interestingly, if I repeat my NGram with *who* instead of *whom* (to focus on "real, normal" speakers, rather than pedants and their credulous flock), the *only* version that shows up at all is who he was close to.** That's bottom of the popularity charts with people who still say *whom*. – FumbleFingers Jun 09 '23 at 10:20

1 Answers1

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Syntactically, both OP's examples are fine. Idiomatically, with is as common as to for construction #1, but for the less common construction #2, with is too rare to even show on this chart...

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There's no difference in meaning or register (level of formality / informality) for any of the 4 permutations. They're just different ways of saying the same thing.

FumbleFingers
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