Saturday, November 18, 2017

prepositions - "My aunt is coming to dinner tomorrow" (grammar of 'to dinner')


My aunt is coming to dinner tomorrow.





The meaning is clear. However, if you think about it, what this seems to literally say is that the aunt is going directly to some dinner (and not even an article is used there).



How would you explain such grammar?






I posted this question before on ELL StackExchange. However, I did not receive an answer that would prove the grammar aspects of this.



The user Laure there told me that what is happening here is that some phrases, words, articles are simply omitted.




However, I did not receive a proof of this and I would like to have you confirm this (if this is true, of course). Just to make sure. The user seemed to be the only one claiming this. If I see more people agreeing with it, I'll be more confident this is true.






Edit: After some discussions, I've now decided that the explicit question I should ask here is:




Why is there no article,'the' nor possessive pronoun/noun before the singular noun 'dinner'?





Isn't there a grammar rule that tells us that singular nouns always have at least one of those?



A popular example of such usage would be the phrase 'Go to bed.'

No comments:

Post a Comment