Today I saw this tweet from Donald Trump:
Russia, Syria, and Iran are killing, or on their way to killing, thousands of innocent civilians in Idlib Province. Don’t do it! Turkey is working hard to stop this carnage.
I am not a native English speaker (unlike Mr Trump!) but as far as I have learned, the verb after to is in the infinitive form and this tweet doesn't sound grammatically correct to me. Is this form commonly used in today's English?
Best Answer
Not every "to" marks an infinitive:
This is the ordinary preposition "to". In general, it takes an object that serves as a destination or target. This may be more obvious when the object is a simple noun like "store" or "victory".
When the object is a gerund or a gerund phrase, we still have the same ordinary kind of prepositional phrase. We can treat this "to" the same as we do when the preposition is followed by a simple noun.
This is a reasonable paraphrasing of the tweet. This is probably the structure that you expected to see -- a structure that uses the infinitive-marking "to".
As a native reader, I find the grammar of the original tweet to be perfectly ordinary. My paraphrasing is also perfectly ordinary. There's more than one way to be grammatically right.