"I'm going home." "I'm going to school." "I'm going to the hospital." How did the rules for preposition & article use develop this way in American English?

Home is a special word. Home is a noun, adjective, adverbial, and an intransitive preposition.

I've cobbled this together this from various sources online, hope this helps:

Syntax analysis

  1. Let’s go home.
  2. *Let’s go to home.
  3. *Let’s go school.
  4. Let’s go to school.
  5. I’m home.
  6. I’m at home.

In the examples above home can be considered a type of adverbial, giving information about the space, as in "I am around", "I am here" or "I am gone". For this reason, "home" is not a noun any longer, such as school. It is a concept of space, such as here, there, away etc.

Consider

  1. I am going home

Here 'home' behaves like an adverbial. For example,

  1. *I am going school

is ungrammatical, so home in example 7 can’t be a noun. This makes a lot of sense, especially if you replace the word "home" with other words whose meaning is clear to everyone:

  • *I am hospital
  • *I am school
  • *I am house / I'm going house (where house is strictly a noun/place)

Other spatial/directional examples:

  1. I am away / I'm going away
  2. I am there (now) / I'm going there
  3. I am nearby / I'm going nearby(?)

The grammaticality of "I am here" or "I am there" implies that home is adverbial.

However!

  • I’m home.

Let’s break this down.

I’m home=I am home

The subject is I and the copular complement would be analyzed as a preposition phrase headed by an intransitive preposition, namely home. (Yes, home also occurs as a noun; but not in this situation. Prepositions are traditionally required to have noun phrase complements in grammar, but this is a mistake. There are three pieces of evidence that support it being a PP.

First, home in example 5 can be substituted with here and there. Here and there generally can substitute for (locative) PPs, which suggests that the words they replace are also PPs.

Second, taking right-modification as a general test for locative preposition status (right up the stairs, right over the bar), we see that here and there are either prepositions or have a null preposition along with them. And, using the right-modification test for home again shows that, at least in the "going home" sorts of cases, home patterns like it is a preposition or has a null preposition for right to modify (I think "I am right home" can be ruled out by right requiring a path to modify as part of its semantics).

Third, coordination of home and a more obvious PP is available (I am going home and to the store). Coordination generally requires like syntactic objects, again supporting the analysis that home is a PP. There doesn't seem to be any evidence for home as an adverbial, or it's trivially an adverbial because the definition of adverbial is so vague to include lots of different things.

There's a certain set of places which allow for speakers to omit 'at', and others which have 'at' as obligatory. It's an interesting paradigm, but I'm not sure what there is to it.

  • I'm home.
  • I'm at home.
  • *I'm school.
  • I'm at school.
  • I'm there.
  • *I'm at there.
  • *I'm that place.
  • I'm at that place.

These examples deal with lexical items of distinct categories (adverbs, nouns.) However, the semantic connection should be ignored between these two examples. Even though the two words are distinct in their syntactic function, they are co-referential to the notion of 'my house', or, metaphorically, 'a place where I feel comfortable.' So, what’s home? Home is a noun, an adjective, and an adverbial(an adverb as here/there), and if your definition of adverbial needs to be more precise, an intransitive preposition.

/r/linguistics Thread