963: Exceptions to Standard Sentence Formation in English Jul 29, 2017

Every language will have a lot of so called "rules", but so long as someone is understood, exceptions can appear. One feature of English that tends not to be too flexible is that word-order indicated the syntax of the word, so "the man bites the dog" means something different from "the dog bites the man. It is not usually possible to begin with a grammatical object before the verb like it is in languages that indicate this morphologically, such as Latin, but still there are a few exceptions, such as the colloquial phrase, "what say you?". Another feature is that prepositions are necessary to indicate motion to/from somewhere. If going to a store, or to a city, the word 'to' is necessary for example, but this isn't the case with the word 'home', as that is implied, as in "I'm going home" rather than "I'm going to home". Normally, the only words that do not need 'to' in this case are adverbs like 'out', 'here' or 'there', though it should be noted that if an article like 'the' or 'my' comes before 'home', the word 'to' needs to be included.