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I need to know what down in this specific sentence means. I don't know if it is a preposition or an adverb.

halsjcb
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    At the risk of being contradicted by the professional grammarians I would say it is an adverb, qualifying the verb put. One could also say put down your pencils. Or could put down be regarded as a composite verb? – WS2 Oct 18 '15 at 23:20
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    Oh boy, you've really done it now!!! :) – Araucaria - Him Oct 19 '15 at 00:03
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    @WS2 It depends on whether you mean to place your pencils on the table or whether you mean to disparage them. – deadrat Oct 19 '15 at 00:17
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    @Araucaria this is the schroedinger's cat of grammar. – michael_timofeev Oct 19 '15 at 00:18
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    The same part of speech as "up" in "Put your hands up." – Hot Licks Oct 19 '15 at 00:19
  • @HotLicks But probably not as in "I have to put up with the people who put up with me." – deadrat Oct 19 '15 at 00:26
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    @deadrat - Up with that I will not put. – Hot Licks Oct 19 '15 at 00:27
  • @HotLicks "Put up or shut up." Not a challenge; just another (counter)example. – deadrat Oct 19 '15 at 00:32
  • It's a particle, in the same way "off" is in the expression "take off." – michael_timofeev Oct 19 '15 at 00:32
  • One can note that, with expression of this form, one can usually reorder the words. Eg, "Put down your pencils" or "Put up your hands". When reordered, the words "down" and "up" are functioning as adverbs. But this approach is less satisfying for "Put your hands in your pockets", as one would be unlikely to say "Put in your pockets your hands." Yet "in your pockets" fills the same syntactic niche as "up". – Hot Licks Oct 19 '15 at 00:42
  • @HotLicks But you might say Put in your pockets anything currently lying on this half of the table, including the money, but excludingt the penknife and the foreign coins.. The positioning of the adverbial clause in your pockets is principally determined by the length and complexity of that which follows. – WS2 Oct 19 '15 at 07:48
  • @WS2 - I would be very unlikely to use that construction. I'd more likely say "Take anything currently lying on this half of the table, including the money, but excluding the pocket knife and the foreign coins, and put it all in your pocket." – Hot Licks Oct 19 '15 at 11:48
  • I like to call them Adverbial Particles, this is often used in POS annotaion. – Vilmar Oct 19 '15 at 12:17
  • This will be confusing because, strictly speaking, "Put your pencils down" is bad grammar, so you're asking "What is the name of this word, according to , when it's used in a sentence which doesn't follow those rules"? It's akin to saying "According to the rules of baseball, can a runner on fifth base steal a base?", the answer being "I can't really answer that because there is no fifth base according to the rules of baseball." – Max Williams Oct 19 '15 at 12:43
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    @MaxWilliams In what dialect is "Put your pencils down" bad grammar? – StoneyB on hiatus Oct 19 '15 at 13:01
  • @StoneyB on further investigation, perhaps none. I thought it was wrong to split "put down" into different parts of the sentence, but maybe i'm wrong. – Max Williams Oct 19 '15 at 13:37
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    @deadrat In fact, the put up part appears to be put X up in the sense of pocket, endure, which for some reason evolved into put up with* X* around 1750. See OED 1 s.v. put, 53 put up, sense p (a) and (b). – StoneyB on hiatus Oct 19 '15 at 21:40

2 Answers2

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You pays your money and you takes your choice:

  • Traditional grammar calls it an adverb: a word which modifies words which are not nouns.
    —But down plays an obligatory role in this sentence; I see no sense in which it can be said to "modify" put.

  • Some contemporary grammarians call it a particle:

    a word that
     does not belong to one of the main classes of words
     is invariable in form, and
     typically has grammatical or pragmatic meaning.
        —SIL Glossary of Linguistic Terms

    —In other words, particle is a box where we dump anything which doesn't belong anywhere else. (At one time adverb served this function, but that use is no longer chic.)

  • Other modernists call it an intransitive preposition—essentially a word which can serve as a preposition phrase all by itself, without an object.

    —I like this. Down in your sentence behaves just like any other preposition phrase (on the table, in your pockets, behind your ears) would, as a complement to the verb put depicting the goal where the object of the verb ends up.

StoneyB on hiatus
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    Good answer. I up voted it. But what about "clean up your room / clean your room up"? – michael_timofeev Oct 19 '15 at 00:45
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    @michael_timofeev That's a lot harder to sort out, because what we're dealing with is a figurative extension of up from clearly locative complement uses in collocations like pick up, sweep up to an effectively adverbial sense in of something like "completely" in collocations like eat up, tear up. Clean up seems to lie somewhere in the middle. ... But I think the 'core' sense is still locative, and the syntactic function is still complementary -- so I'd stick with calling it a preposition. Prepositions are gnarly that way in practically all contexts. – StoneyB on hiatus Oct 19 '15 at 01:03
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    I ask, because I get asked this often in the classroom and I usually call them particles. "Up" is one that seems to be a particle often. "Down" and "off" not so much. I call them particles because they can move in the sentence and change the emphasis when they move. Interestingly, if we replace "your pencils" with "that" it seems harder to say "Put down that." It's certainly possible but seems more awkward than "Put that down." So, I think calling it a preposition is better. – michael_timofeev Oct 19 '15 at 01:12
  • Speaking of "down" here's an example from ten minutes ago http://english.stackexchange.com/q/280968/129806 – michael_timofeev Oct 19 '15 at 01:15
  • @michael_timofeev Yes, that's a nice one. Down there of course is pretty transparently locative: you put your bet down = on the table. – StoneyB on hiatus Oct 19 '15 at 01:18
  • It's a good answer. However, think about "down" being a modifier of a prepositional phrase, the PP itself being understood in the example, which means something like "Put your pencils down on your desks!" A modifier of a PP would, I suppose, be an adverb (downstairs), but in this sentence, a PP (upstairs). – Greg Lee Oct 19 '15 at 01:36
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    "Turn on the light." vs. "Walk on the rug." -- In the former, 'on' seems more closely tied to the verb than to the object. In the latter, rearrangement to "Walk the rug on" isn't satisfactory. – user2338816 Oct 19 '15 at 02:55
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    While "put your pencils down" is something of a set phrase, do you really see down as obligatory here [assuming I understand what you mean by obligatory]? You could also say "put your pencils away", "put your pencils over there", "put your pencils back in your desks", etc. – The Photon Oct 19 '15 at 05:10
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    I feel like I am missing the joke, but why did you use the term "you pays"? Is that some English SE meme? – March Ho Oct 19 '15 at 05:41
  • Yes, "down" definitely is modifying "put", as "put down" and "put ... down" are common phrases. For example the phrase You'd better put down the duckie if you want to play the saxaphone. IMHO those are both the same part of speech (whatever you want to call it), and its the user's option whether to place their "down" before or after the object clause. And yes, @michael_timofeev 's "up" is the same kind of thing. – T.E.D. Oct 19 '15 at 10:44
  • @ThePhoton Down itself is not obligatory, but it occupies an obligatory slot in the sentence. As far as I know the only thing that can be put without a locative is a shot, except in contexts where the locative is implicit in the situation: put a bid, put a question. – StoneyB on hiatus Oct 19 '15 at 11:29
  • @MarchHo It's an old tag; I learned it from Huckleberry Finn, but it's said here to be of BrE origin. – StoneyB on hiatus Oct 19 '15 at 13:00
  • There are major problems with the intransitive preposition analysis. 'Put your pencil here' is another directional particle; there is no prepositional for it to have been reduced from. 'The war was dreadful, but Europe slowly recovered after' can be seen as a reduced form, but 'We went down to the lake and walked round' introduces obvious difficulties. Being able to complement 'put' is only one property of typical PPs. – Edwin Ashworth Oct 19 '15 at 19:38
  • in-transitive? Sounds like this phrase is... going places! ba dum tss – corsiKa Oct 19 '15 at 20:02
  • @EdwinAshworth Here, there, thither &c I take to be pro-PP. I see no difficulty with down to or round. Down to is paralleled in either stacked PP like on Broadway at 7th or double P like into, off of, until, depending on how you want to analyze it. Round is simply a variant of around. But if you want something problematic, how bout home? :) – StoneyB on hiatus Oct 19 '15 at 21:24
  • We've covered why home behaves like an adverbial here before. Where it does, it's a legacy of an inflected form of the noun, meaning [at home] or [to home]. // I'm saying that justification for the intransitive preposition position often involves analogy with a true PP. 'We'll come after [the match etc].' But with 'We went down to the lake and walked round', there does not need to be the 'round it' interpretation. I think that locative and directional particles need their own class/es. – Edwin Ashworth Oct 19 '15 at 21:36
  • @EdwinAshworth Bare around likewise is etymologically a PP, like across and away. I have no objection to a new term for locative/directive words, or l/d phrases either, for that matter; the old-fashioned mechanical analysis as "adverbs" is hopeless. – StoneyB on hiatus Oct 19 '15 at 21:50
  • I'd agree in that I'm not happy about 'around' in 'walked around' being classed as a 'modifier' of the verb. But surely the central property of a preposition is distributional, in that it 'connects to' (attaches) a meaningful noun phrase. Other usages (eg from under the bed) (where 'from' attaches a PP) are much rarer and can be seen as peripheral. Attaching nothing seems a gross overlumping. – Edwin Ashworth Oct 20 '15 at 10:06
  • @EdwinAshworth Seems to me this is a difference in syntactic deployment, not in word-class (but I admit to a kind of antipathy to word-classes in English anyway). I don't see a different around being used in "walking around" and "walking around the garden" or "waking around midnight". – StoneyB on hiatus Oct 20 '15 at 13:43
  • The cohesiveness between the different words is markedly different. 'Walking around' has a near MWV meaning. Compare 'peregrinate' = 'travel or wander from place to place' [ODO] The particle modifies the meaning of the simplex verb (admittedly not as much as in many, unquestionable MWVs).{(http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/peregrinate)}. 'Walking [around the garden]' has a typical adverbial modification of a simplex verb. Walking [[at]] [around midnight] uses 'around' to broaden the time interval specified. It needs to immediately precede 'midnight' and is tightly bound. – Edwin Ashworth Oct 20 '15 at 18:53
  • @michael_timofeev But what about "clean up your room / clean your room up"? "Up" in this sense implies "completely" and is somewhat emphatic. Consider "He opened the box" - he might open the lid only slightly... but "He opened the box up" implies that he opened it completely. "He used up all the fuel." All this tends to point at "up/down, etc. as being adverbial in action. – Greybeard Mar 26 '21 at 17:26
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Put your pencils down.

The example that you give makes use of a multi-word verb, a phenomenon that is especially common in the English language. According to the Cambridge dictionary, "down" in your sentence would be an adverb particle, the best of both worlds of StoneyB's response. In fact, "down" is on the list of the most common adverb particles.

Specifically, "put down" is a phrasal verb, a classification of multi-word verbs. Phrasal verbs commonly take objects, and in the given example, the object would be

your pencil,

or more strictly speaking, the noun

pencil

modified by the possessive adjective "your."

The Cambridge Dictionary gives a very similar example:

Take your shoes off.

where the direct object

your shoes

splits the main verb

Take

and the adverb particle

off

of the phrasal verb "take off."

Check out this link for more information on multi-word verbs: Cambridge Dictionary.

  • I don't think this is a phrasal verb. Phrasal verbs must modify the meaning of the verb they are attached to. "Take" and "take off" is a good example... "off" completely changes the whole meaning of the verb. "Put down (on the desk) is just "put the pencil downward (on the desk)". – Clever Neologism Oct 19 '15 at 19:43
  • See Put Down. Do you have a source that indicates that phrasal verbs must modify meaning? –  Oct 19 '15 at 19:48
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    I invite you to look at this page as an additional resource. It lists many usages of the phrasal verb "put down." Yes, phrasal verbs often take on many meanings, but they're not exclusively used to denote something different from the standalone verb. –  Oct 19 '15 at 19:53
  • Parsimony, and because if phrasal verbs didn't modify core meaning, they wouldn't need to be named something different other than "verb and adverb that often go together". The sentence is completely explainable without resorting to "exotic" grammar concepts. – Clever Neologism Oct 19 '15 at 20:01
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    I maintain my position and respectfully disagree, and I challenge you to find a source that supports your position. I don't see phrasal verbs as an "exotic" grammar concept. In fact, phrasal verbs seem rather straightforward. They're well-defined by many reputable sources, and in all cases, whether meaning is modified or not, the terms "take off" and "put down" are comprised of a "verb and adverb that often go together." A phrasal verb is defined as exactly that; the only difference is that "phrasal verb" communicates the same thing in fewer words. To each his own. –  Oct 19 '15 at 20:15
  • I mean, if you want a cite, just go to the Wikipedia page for "phrasal verb". It's the first sentence, and the first cite. By "exotic" I mean "beyond grade-school level grammar". There would be no need for the term "phrasal verb" if it weren't a distinct concept from verb + adjective. – Clever Neologism Oct 19 '15 at 20:43