please help... RE PREPS and RELATIVE ADVERB

[kariboops]

hello!

this is a solicitation for your opinion:
This house where my parents still live in is on main street in Davao City.

is "in" necessary?
there is a contention that if we want to use where we have to erase in... is this correct?

if we can drop in, what are the cases in which the preposition in can be dropped.

thank you very much.

[Lorikeet]

In your sentence, "This house where my parents still live in is on main street in Davao City." shouldn't have the "in". In fact, I'd probably make it "The house where my parents still live is on Main Street in Davao City." You could also say, "The house that my parents still live in is on Main Street in Davao City."

[fluffyhamster]

As Lori has implied, you only need one "locative" word, two would be functional overkill:

The house where my parents still live...
The house (that) my parents still live in...
*The house where my parents still live in...

(also: The house in which my parents still live...)

Note that the order of all the words other than 'where' and 'in' (and 'in which') is exactly the same, so you can take your pick - you needn't think that you ought to use a relavitizer between the two noun phrases, because they can be processed one after the other (with an ensuing "gap") perfectly easily.

But all of this is a bit academic when you consider that we could instead simply (and far more naturally) say 'My parents still live (in that house, not a tent, come on now, surely you remember!) (on MS) in DC'; and if somebody did go to all the trouble of constructing a relative clause, I'd start expecting more in the complement than a basic statement of location (rather, a detailed description of the house itself).

I'd also like to add that the 'still' seems functionally unnecessary (we either live somewhere or we now don't i.e. we lived/used to live there, but have now moved); that is, it seems more natural to me to be asked if our parents still live somewhere, than to mention the fact not just the previous once but now yet again! We'd probably be more likely to say that our parents have moved than to say they still live somewhere (unless we thought their current housing or neighbourhood deplorable or something).

So I myself would probably say 'My parent's house is.../The house my parents live in is.../My parents live in a ... house', or 'Where (=the area where/in which; =the house in which?) my parents live is...' (all sentences followed by a description), as opposed to '(Yes) my parents (still) live in DC ((in that house) on MS, as you probably can recall)'.

As you might have guessed, I am not a great fan of these kind of "grammar" questions. I suppose one could say that they are attempting to teach something, but often that relatively minor point soon gets lost in (and to my mind is rather overshadowed by) the functional fudging of the strange phrasings that the test writers dream up.

It's hard to avoid getting long-winded when there's something odd about a sentence; in practice I'd avoid this sort of explanation/justification and just get on with contextualizing decent examples as simply and straightforwardly as possible.

[kariboops]

thanks for your help guys...

twas actually a question from a student in Korea...

thank you!