Dave's ESL Cafe's Student Discussion Forums

[Tetsu]

Are the following two sentences in each set both correct?
If they are, what's the difference in meaning?

S11: Where is he going?
S12: Where is he going to?

S21: Where is he coming?
S22: Where is he coming to?

S31: Where is he walkig?
S32: Where is he walking to?

S41: Where is he swimming?
S42: Where is he swimming to?

If they are used in some very specific situation, please tell me that.

Thanks a lot for the help.
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Tetsu

[Anuradha Chepur]

1 and 2: I think minus the to, the question focusses on destination and with the to, it focusses on direction.

3: I don't think Where is he walking? makes much sense without a specific context and more so in the intended use. Again to is about direction

4: Where is he swimming? could mean in which swimming pool/river/lake/etc.

[miss oikawa]

I pretty much agree with the above, but I'd say Where is he going to? sounds a bit clumsy. Just Where is he going? would be better. Same with Coming. Also I find the second one a liitle strange, as in this sentence the place you're coming to sounds like here, i.e if you were at home and asked Where is he coming? the answer would be "home" (here) so the question wouldn't be necessary. You could say Where is he GOING? but not coming.

In the third and fourth examples, I'd say the difference is between DIRECTION and LOCATION. Q. Where is he walking(swimming)? A. He's walking(swimming) in the park(lake). Q.Where's he walking(swimming) to? He's walking(swimming) to the bank(island).

[Tetsu]

Hello, Miss Oikawa

Thanks a lot for your kind help.

You wrote A1.
A1: I'd say Where is he going to? sounds a bit clumsy. Just Where is he going? would be better.

I understand A1. But can't you think of any situations S12 is possible? If you can, please tell me them even if they're so rare or unusual.

You wrote A2.
A2: the question wouldn't be necessary.

I understand A2. But say that she's waiting for him and he's so late and he said "I'm coming. I'll be there in thirty minutes." many times over the phone but he doesn't appear and she's irritated and says "Where is he coming to? He's telling a lie. He has to be running away." In that situation, isn't S21 or S22 correct for her to say? My question is the same as in A1, i.e. can't you think of any situations S21 or S22 is possible? If you can, please tell me them even if they're so rare or unusual.

You wrote A3.
A3: In the third and fourth examples, I'd say the difference is between DIRECTION and LOCATION.

I understand and agree with A3.

Thanks!
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Tetsu

[miss oikawa]

Hi Tetsu

In the first example I can't think of any situation at all where Where is he going to? would be normal, because the use of TO could be confusing. It sounds like something is missing. The listener might think something should follow the TO, possibly Where is he going to.. go to eat? or Where is he going (in order) to have lunch? If you used Which.... there would be no confusion and the use of TO is acceptable, i.e Which restaurant is he going to? has a clear meaning.

In your example using COMING, using that word would be strange because to use COMING you must know the destination. In your example I would say "What's he doing?!" most naturally, but you could say "Where is he going?" As you said, you don't where he is going now, he's not meeting the girl, so you can't use COMING because you don't know what his destination is.

[Tetsu]

Hello, Miss Oikawa

I understand well.
Your sentence examples helped me a lot to understand the nuance and your explanation is so wonderful!

Thanks a lot for your kind help.
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Tetsu

[miss oikawa]

No problem Tetsu. Fire away with anything else you want to ask. In fact there is something I haven't mentioned yet because it would have confused the conversation a little, and it still doesn't use WHERE so it's not directly relevant, but there is the idiom (you might have heard anyway) TO COME TO...... meaning arriving at or on the way towards a certain situation i.e That comes to 25 pounds 34 pence (after adding up prices), or What is the world coming to? usually meaning the speaker thinks the world and the people are going bad, i.e young people are behaving worse nowadays. However these examples use What, not Where so it's not exactly the same.

[redset]

I just want to disagree with one little thing 'Where are you going to?' is fine as far as I'm concerned - it's true that people would usually just say 'where are you going?' but there's nothing wrong with adding the to, in informal speech at least.

[Tetsu]

Hello, Miss Oikawa

Thanks for your addtional coments on Mon Aug 07, 2006 11:14 pm.
I understand that well. It helped me a lot to understand your former comments better or deeper.

Thanks!!
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Tetsu

[miss oikawa]

Redset, maybe it's a country thing. I'm English and I can't imagine anyone in England, in casual speech, saying Where are you going to? Say I was sitting at home with my flatmate and my flatmate went out, if I said "Where are you going to?" I would feel I was speaking really unnaturally. Also, as I said, it sounds to me like an incomplete sentence. The "to" sounds like part of the infinitive, to go, to meet, etc. Where am I going to ... what? There needs to be something following it. Same with when, who, etc Can you imagine saying "When are you going to?", "Who are you going to?" or "Why are you going to?" etc.?
Having said that, (!) I did think of an exception, but I think this is the only place I've heard it. At the train station when buying tickets I can imagine the guy in the ticket office office saying "Where're you GOING to?" with the stress on GOING. "Going to" is easily understood as meaning "headed" here because of the situation and you wouldn't expect anything to follow it, but personally I still feel it sounds clumsy.

[redset]

I'm English too, so I'm not sure it's just a country thing. Like I said, people would almost always drop the to in natural speech so I definitely agree with you on that, I just don't think that adding it is actually wrong. It definitely sounds a little affected and maybe more likely to show up in stylised speech. It's just a rearrangement of 'to where are you going?' really - you could use it to contrast 'where are you coming from?' with 'and where are you going to', or if you don't want to say 'where are you going?' if it would imply the person shouldn't be trying to go anywhere.

Those are more specific examples, but I'm just saying that it works fine as an alternative to 'where are you going?' - even if it's not necessarily common. Your other examples do sound weird, but they're either not meant to be paired with to as a preposition or they'd sound even stranger without it ('who are you going?'). You're right though, in general informal speech it does have a bus driver sound to it

[Anuradha Chepur]

I agree the to in Where are you going to? is clumsily redundant, but I'm reminded of the nursery rhyme Where are you going to my pretty maid...

It also helps to note that where is an equivalent of
to which place, and it's okay to say either To which place are you going/ or Which place are you going to ?

He is going to London.
Where substitutes the phrase to London and not just London. So after the substitution, there is no to left in the sentence for us to scramble it around.

If at all acceptable, it might carry emotional subtexts of sarcasm/suspision/shock when we say Where are you going to?

[miss oikawa]

Bus Driver sounds certainly shouldn't be discriminated agaianst Interesting point about "To where are you going?" I would say this is perfectly fine, if very formal, but how about "To whom are you speaking?" This should change to "WHO are you speaking to?" not WHOM, should it not, so I'm not sure if that's an appropriate example. I don't think we can always move words around just like that.
Also if we think of the basic verb form used in the latter example it would be "to speak TO someone" so "Who are you speaking TO?" is fine, but it's not "to go TO somewhere". As Miss Chepur said above, the TO part would be contained in SOMEWHERE i.e to go TO LONDON, to go OUT, to go HOME, to go AND HAVE LUNCH. It's not necessarily TO anywhere, there might not be any preposition or a different one, and when you make a question out of it you go from "I am going SOMEWHERE" to "WHERE are you going?" Anyway, prepositions, what a pain in the ***

[CP]

"To whom are you speaking?" does become, "Whom are you speaking to?", even though in casual conversation most people would say, "Who are you speaking to?".
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You live a new life for every new language you speak. -Czech proverb

[redset]

I guess I just ride more buses than trains! I think whom is one of those tricky words with a few rules about when it should and shouldn't appear, and what you should do with prepositions when it does, so I don't know if that's a good comparison. I think go might be a strange example, because with verbs like speak you need a preposition when it takes an object - you say 'I am speaking to my friend' and 'who are you speaking to?', but if you lose either preposition it sounds completely wrong. With go you still need the preposition in a statement ('I am going to London') but it's unnecessary in a question, and we're even talking about it being incorrect there.

And what Anuradha's saying is really interesting, I hadn't looked at it like that - but I don't think it's as simple as saying where always subsitutes to *destination*. You could say that where is also an equivalent of from which place - and we can say 'which place are you coming from?' but never 'where are you coming?' I don't think where always carries an implicit to because you could answer the question 'where are you going?' in any number of ways that don't include a destination: 'we're going north', 'we're just driving around', 'I'm going through here'... adding to to the question shows we're explicitly asking for a destination, and might even be necessary if people are being vague ('yes, but where are you going to?'). So I think the to is separate enough to be able to appear in questions, if that's your thing

I really hope I haven't scared away any students with all this - and yeah, prepositions sure can be 'fun'!