1

Check out this place!
Check this place out!

Are the two sentences above both correct? and if so, do they have the exact same meaning?

2 Answers 2

0

Yes, they are both grammatical, and as far as I know they have the same meaning.

I think "Check this place out" is more common for prosodic reasons: it puts a strongly stressed word at the end. "Check out this place" puts emphasis on "this", and suggests "as opposed to [some other] place".

3
  • According to Google Ngrams, your conclusion about frequency is incorrect for general English, although correct for BrE. See my edited answer for a link. Jun 2, 2019 at 0:24
  • I don't see any reason for the downvote here. Jun 2, 2019 at 0:44
  • Ngrams might not reflect spoken word as well as it does written word.
    – Catskul
    May 3, 2021 at 21:11
1

Both are valid, and reasonably natural, if rather informal. The meanings are essentially the same. The first, with "place" at the end, may emphasize the place a bit more than the other. The second, ending with "out", is more strict;ly informal in usage.

a Google Ngram shows "check out this place" to be more than twice as frequent as "check this place out" in their collection of texts. However, in the "British" sub-collection, only the phrase "check this place out" occurs at all.

1
  • The GloWbE corpus disagrees. "Check out this place" has 13 instances (3 each frrom US and Singapore, 2 from Canada, and a few 1s). "Check this place out" has 60 ( 14 US, 8 Canada, 7 Australlia, 4-6 Far Eastern Englishes, 3 UK). I think the numbers are too small to conclude anything - unsurprising, since this is far less likely to be written than spoken. Google Ngrams is presumably from conversations in books.
    – Colin Fine
    Jun 2, 2019 at 13:04

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .