Consider the phrase go home. What part of speech is home? I'm going to suggest, following the analysis of Huddleston and Pullum in the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, that it is an example of something that traditional grammars do not recognize.
As a precursor, I will note that "part of speech" is often much more grammatical than lexical. I mean that, for many words, what part of speech they are depends on how they're used in a phrase more than it does what word they are. The word jump, for example, is both a noun and a verb; reddened is both a verb (she reddened) and an adjective (his skin became somewhat reddened). This is in part because English has a number of zero-derivative rules that turn one part of speech into another without changing it (e.g. a verb jump can become a noun jump, meaning "an instance of jumping"). In part, it's because English has relatively little in the way of grammatical endings or agreement, and relies strongly on word order to build phrases, so it is relatively easy to drop one part of speech in a slot meant for another, without changing it, and subsequently re-interpret it as an example of the part of speech for the slot it's in (e.g., The company's in the red, where the adjective red has been turned into a noun by dropping it into a noun slot.)
All this is to say that the fact that home is usually a noun, my beautiful home in the suburbs, should not overly concern us when looking at go home.
Because, in fact, home is clearly not a noun in go home:
That is, home is not the head of a noun phrase, because you can't put things that go around a noun in a noun phrase around it, like articles and adjectives, and you can't substitute other similar nouns for it.
It's also not an adverb. It doesn't tell us when (go tomorrow) or how (go quietly). It's not modifying the whole sentence (suddenly, she went). It's not a modifier of degree (go particularly quickly), although it's not in a context where degree modification is particularly available.
Instead, let's look at what role it's playing in the sentence. It's indicating the destination or direction of the action of go. In fact, "go + complement indicating destination or direction of going" is one of the primary uses of go. We can say with a fair amount of confidence that the role that home is playing is the complement of go.
Now, we look at what form that complement can take. It can be a prepositional phrase: go to the store, go around the bend in the river. It can be other things that look like home: go right, go south, go clockwise.
I draw three distinctions here:
So home is a complement of go in a sense that takes a prepositional phrase as complement. Huddleston and Pullum's analysis (drawing on earlier work) is to say that home is a preposition, and that therefore all complements of go in the direction/destination sense are prepositions.
Huddleston and Pullum martial a large and convincing set of arguments that this sort of analysis is useful. For instance, it seems to immediately simplify analysis if around is the same part of speech in hang around as it is in hang around the store.
This is fairly radical, because the first thing you notice about home is that it doesn't take a noun phrase as a complement the way all traditional prepositions do (to the store). Obviously, the traditional definition of preposition is inadequate.
I can't quote Huddleston/Pullum's definition of preposition per se, but I can say that they reorganize the category of preposition by saying that a preposition licenses a complement in the same way that a verb does--i.e., that some prepositions have no complement, like an intransitive verb; some prepositions have a noun phrase complement, like a transitive verb; and some prepositions have other complements like other prepositional phrases (go around to the back) or clauses (go after the rain stops falling). And, like verbs, a preposition may be able to license different kinds of complement. after, for example, can take a complement that is null (I'll visit you after; cf. I'll come with, which is a complementless use of with that is not universally accepted), a noun phrase (I'll come after happy hour), a non-finite verb phrase (I'll come after finishing work), or a full clause (I'll come after it stops raining).
The identification of home as a preposition implies that directions like right and south are also prepositions. I am, incidentally, somewhat conflicted about clockwise, which seems to have a manner sense going along with its direction sense: How are you going to go? Clockwise versus *How are you going to go? Right; compare to Which way are you going to go? Clockwise/Right. But go clockwise around the bush/go right around the bush, where right can have its anti-left sense (as well as its directly sense); it looks like clockwise/right are the complements of go with around the bush modifying them. So probably clockwise is a preposition.
Anyway, there you go. home can be a preposition. You can go home now.
Posted by Greg at April 9, 2009 2:32 PM
Any reason to reject the alternate in which it is a noun which, in this idiom, comes with an implied "to one's" before it?
First, I laid out the case that it's not a noun, viz., it can't be the head of a noun phrase. It can't take an article or adjectives or modifying prepositional phrases*. This is pretty diagnostic of not being a noun.
Second, it's theoretically fairly unsound to analyze a phrase by analyzing the phrase with whatever additional imaginary words you want to add in order to make the analysis simple.
Compare to the old traditional I'm taller than him, where him is said to be wrong because there's an invisible is at the end of the sentence which requires he in the subject case: I'm taller than he [is]. The actual honest fact is that there's no is there, and you can tell because nobody says is there or has any difficulty understanding the sentence without it.
One can readily construct comparatives of this sort which have heavy-enough components or appropriate context such that, for clarity, you use a clause as complement of than, but that doesn't change the fact that there's no is in I'm taller than him.
It is perhaps relevant to emphasize that there's no problem with a language having equivalent ways of saying the same thing, so there's no problem with the fact that the language readily supports saying both I'm taller than him and I'm taller than he is. The speaker will choose which to use for style or register or differing patterns of emphasis or whim; this is a feature, not a bug.
So I'm going home and I'm going to my home are more or less semanticaly equivalent, but they're not syntactically equivalent as far as home is concerned. In general, even if the history of the language would support the notion that the latter gave rise to the former, that doesn't mean that the former is analyzed as if it were the latter; grammar would have changed in order to permit the former.
*Not all nouns can. E.g., there is good reason to consider pronouns a special subtype of noun, and they can't dress up the way archetypical nouns can.
Okay, then, is there a reason not to let it be a noun and import the Locative case from our Latin roots to describe the usage?
Yes. Lots of reasons. #1 being, it's not a noun. It can't take an article, it can't take an adjective modifier, it can't take a prepositional phrase modifier. It's not the head of a noun phrase. Obviously, I'm being unclear, so what do I need to say to clear this up?
#2 being, you cannot swap it out for any other noun. In principle, if it were a noun, you should be able to swap in a similar sort of noun designating a place. house would seem especially promising in this respect, but you can't *go house or even *go my house; home has some grammatical property that house, park, bank, Nieuwland Physics Building do not.
#3 being, there is no locative case in English, and there wasn't one in the case system we inherited from proto-Germanic. (The Latin case system, of course, had no discernible impact on the case system in English.) It is more or less reasonable to say that English has two cases--plain and possessive--but the possessive case has peculiar properties (it applies to noun phrases as a whole, not nouns, e.g. the cat stole the dog I rescued from the vet's bone and exists in parallel with a periphrastic possessive in of (and sometimes in superfluity, as in I found that coat of my mother's in the back seat of the car).
Nouns are marked for location periphrastically by prepositions, e.g. at the town square; this is one of the clues that there's something non-nominal going on in go home, since a noun normally appears there with a preposition specifying direction.
Mostly, though, it's not a noun because it can't be modified in any way by anything that can modify a noun, which is mostly how we can tell whether something's a noun.
I see the point, but there's something about it that still bothers me. It still feels 'noun-y', and a rule or class with a single example ("north", "left", and "widdershins" aren't quite close enough, denoting directions rather than a particular place)
So, one more try: what if it's a pronoun? It seems to have some other properties of pronouns apart from the grammatical: it appears to have something vaguely resembling an antecedent, in that any given use of "home" is referring to a particular specific location[1]
[1] Or a group of specific locations when it's applied to a collective.
Ah! I think I may have thought of a second member for the class. Is "walkabout" (when used in "go walkabout" without an 'on' in there, of course) also a preposition, then?
I exclude go+X in the sense of become X, e.g. go mad.
On what grounds?
Go mad -> I'm mad.
Go home -> I'm home.
But
Go clockwise ! -> I'm clockwise
Go to hospital ! -> I'm to hospital
#5: Pullum has collected "go bush" in Australia and identified bush as a preposition; see here for some discussion and links (in the comments). go walkabout isn't in my native language, but the examples I've seen are kind of stative to my mind, rather than directional. Certainly, there's an element of direction, but it seems that the point is about the goer's psychological state, and it's more akin to go mad. However, see below.
#7: go mad is certainly derived from a metaphorical conversion from movement to state change (the kind of metaphorical conversion that language does all the time).
Note that go mad is susceptible to modification: go completely mad; mad is its typical part of speech in the construction.
This sense of go is roughly equivalent to become, which can substituted for it, I think in most or all examples. And stative verbs like become have some specific properties distinct from other verbs. go in this sense is simply not close enough to go in the sense of "move away from here in a direction or to or toward a destination" to analyze them together, at least for this narrow purpose.
Finally, note that go walkabout is not obviously susceptible to modification. It may legitimately be a zero-complement preposition of direction, even though it's got some stative component. Language is fuzzy, and things can straddle borders.
Incidentally, this transcript is Pullum explicating the more general argument for prepositions that don't (or sometimes don't) take objects.
I submit that go home is functionally equivalent to go west, where home and west are used to identify directions, not destinations. Does that make west a preposition?
I'm pretty sure I said that.
The identification of home as a preposition implies that directions like right and south are also prepositions.
Well, you may be wrong, but at least you're consistent.
You could at least make some pretense toward a refutation rather than just saying "wrong".
I will in addition argue that a great many undisputed prepositions express direction and location. It is therefore unsurprising and consistent if other words that express direction and location are sometimes prepositions, too.
I'll also give you a freebie to trouble me with: far. The first thing I notice about far is that it is susceptible to modification: don't go very far, and in fact is quite certainly an adverb: In This sample emits light in the far red spectrum, it modifies an adjective.* But far is a distance, not a direction or location, and that's a significant difference in language; go far is a different kind of sentence than go away. E.g., go very far, but *go very away.
*But acts as an adjective when red is metonymically nominalized, e.g. this emits in the far red. This is probably not surprising. It's also possible that far red is treated as a compound noun; it has the right stress pattern, I think.
Update: In fact, I think as an expression of distance, far is quite typically a degree adverb; it modifies its target by expressing to what degree the target is realized. Compare to completely, thoroughly, haphazardly, nearly.
Is the distinction between "adverb" and "preposition used exclusively in one-word adverbial prepositional phrases" all that useful, by the way?
(And if "home-the-prepositional-phrase" isn't adverbial, then exactly what is it modifying?)
(And if it is adverbial, why is it that adverbial prepositional phrases get to answer "where" as well as "when" and "how" when plain adverbs don't?)
We're getting much further out of my area of assumed competence, but in general, where is not a question that adverbs answer--they answer how and to what degree and when and in what manner. I would venture to guess that they do not usually and possibly cannot serve as a complement. That is, an adverb is additional material, and the sentence would be grammatically correct without it.
home as a preposition in constructions like head home isn't "modifying" anything; it's serving as the complement of head. Head as a verb always requires a complement, and it must be a prepositional phrase of direction. (It's a better example in this sense than go, because go has so many other uses. Being able to find the right usage to illustrate the theory is why Pullum is a professional and I'm a sideline yutz.)
What do I mean by "complement"? Complement is, more or less, the other part of the phrase needed to make it grammatical and satisfy the need for meaning. Inside the lexicon, your mental list of words, definitions, uses and so on, a verb tells you whether it takes a complement, what kind of complement it takes, and what the complement means. In addition to the subject, eat says "I can be used without a complement (intransitive), or I can be used with a complement that is a direct object that means 'stuff being eaten' (transitive)". give says "I take two complements, one a direct object that means 'thing being given' and one a prepositional phrase with to that means 'person receiving the thing' (indirect object)".
Traditional prepositions have a required complement that is a noun phrase.
So head's listing as a verb says "I always take a complement, and it must be a prepositional phrase of direction". In head home, home is a preposition satisfying that requirement.
When I read 'go home', I think in my head 'go homewards'. I see 'home' in this context as a contraction of the longer word, which seems to be a clear adverb to me.
But adverbial prepositional phrases have no problem answering "where". ("I sang in the shower.", "It's raining on the lawn.", or even "She got red in the face.". So why can't plain adverbs?
...And, in fact, some other plain adverbs evidently can. "Locally" springs immediately to mind. There's also "abroad", which seems to behave identically to "home" with "go", but has the additional use with "study" that is clearly more adverbial than complement-like.