In most cases 'where' seems to be substituting for a prepositional phrase. As in: –
Where do you live? / I live in Brighton.
Where does the train stop? / It stops at Reading and Bristol.
So why is it seemingly okay to say 'Where are you going to?' as well as 'Where are you going?'.
Is the former actually correct? And if it is correct, is it something to do with asserting the preposition 'to' because the listener may otherwise assume 'in' or 'at' as default?
And now I come to think of it why do we say 'Where do you come from?' as opposed to 'Where do you come?'? In this case 'where' is substituting for a noun with no preposition which kind of messes up my theory and my mind at the same time!
Please help – I don't know where my head is at!!!!
Best Answer
I suspect that this is partly related to the demise of the now-archaic whence, hence, thence, whither, hither, and thither, analogous to where, here, and there.
With "going" and "coming" the verb conveys a certain sense of direction, but other verbs don't necessarily. For example, "where are you walking" could be answered "I am walking in the park" or "I am walking to the store." To make the question unambiguous in the second case, we can ask "where are you walking to?".
"Where are you going," however, could not be answered "I am going in the park" -- at least not in modern idiomatic English. The "to" in "where are you going" is implicit in the meaning of the verb.
Another distinction between "where are you going" and "where are you living" is that one has a sense of motion while the other a sense of place. In some languages, verbs that can have either sense (like "walk") take a different grammatical case or -- as in English "walk in" vs. "walk to" -- a different preposition to convey this.
If we go back a bit in time, the following questions are unambiguous:
Similarly:
And:
As the we lost the direction-indicating -ence and -ither words, we compensated by using prepositions with our verbs. We just seem to have done it somewhat inconsistently.