Newsgroups: sci.lang
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!news.mathworks.com!udel!gatech!swrinde!pipex!uknet!comlab.ox.ac.uk!gmb
From: gmb@natcorp.ox.ac.uk (Glynis Baguley)
Subject: Re: "I'm going to the home"?
Message-ID: <1995Mar10.152221.15314@onionsnatcorp.ox.ac.uk>
Originator: gmb@onions.natcorp
Organization: British National Corpus, Oxford University, GB
References: <HCANNON.191.2F53BDBD@macalstr.edu>
Date: Fri, 10 Mar 1995 15:22:21 GMT
Lines: 51

In article <HCANNON.191.2F53BDBD@macalstr.edu> HCANNON@macalstr.edu writes:
> An oddity I've noticed in English --
> 
> I'm going to the hospital.
> I'm going to the Sears Tower.
> I'm going to work.
> I'm going to Chicago.
> I'm going home.
> I'm going downtown.
> 
> 
> WHY????
> 
> Ok, sorry for that outburst.  This has been keeping me up.  I can't figure out 
> why some destinations require "to the", some "to" and some neither.  Any 
> ideas? Or answers?

This is an idea, not an answer!

I think there are quite a number of different rules operating here.
For example, there's the one that says that mostly, we don't use the
article with place-names (eg Chicago, Oxford, England), except
sometimes (the Hague, the United States, the Netherlands).

In non-place-names, `the' seems to be included when a specific
locality is intended, and omitted when the locality is not specific,
or the transfer is as much a change of state as of location. So, one
goes to school, to work, to bed, to sleep, but to the shoe factory, to the
office. I think I might say `to hospital' as well, to indicate that
someone is being hospitalised, but without saying which hospital. But
`into hospital' is perhaps more likely.

The ones without `to' are clearly adverbs rather than nouns. But how
did they get that way?

`Home'? Hmmm. This may be very old indeed. Without checking, I'd guess
that it may come from a defunct case of Old English which incorporated
the `to' meaning without having a separate word for it. Or something.

`Downtown'? Not a British expression, so I'm even vaguer - I don't
know exactly how this sounds to an American ear. To mine, it sounds as
though it may once have been two words, so `down' was just a
preposition, as in `down the road' etc.



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