Standard analysis of the phenomenon in which "where" stands for entire prepositional phrases?

Question

Certain intransitive verbs that take prepositional phrases to express location or motion toward will take *where* without a preposition as a corresponding object in relative or interrogative clauses. For example (I'm using *CGEL*'s convention of using A and B as speaker tags):> A: ***Where** did Mary take her brother?* B: *She took him **to** New York.* Here, ?*Where did Mary take her brother **to**?* seems grammatical, but a bit awkward.> A: ***Where** is John standing?* B: *He's standing **beside** Platform 4, **where** the trains to Glasgow stop.*Here, \\**Where is John standing **beside**?* seems ungrammatical. Although the independent-clause counterpart of *Platform 4, where the trains to Glasgow stop* is *The trains to Glasgow stop at Platform 4*, the relative clause #*where the trains to Glasgow stop **at*** is nonstandard, and ***\\*at where** the trains to Glasgow stop* simply ungrammatical; one would have to change the pronoun and say *at which the trains stop* or *which the trains stop at*. Similar phenomena exist with *here* and *there*:>A: *Has Jamal flown **to** California?* B: *Yes, he flew **there** yesterday* (not the marginally grammatical ?***to there***).>A: *Is Jamal **in** Los Angeles now?* B: *Yes, he is **there***. (Not ***in there***, which is restricted to use to things more container-like than cities, such as A: *Is Jamal in that room?* B: *Yes, he's in there.*)This seems restricted semantically to location and motion toward, not motion from: ***Where** did Mary go?* demands the response *She went **to** New York*, not the syntactically identical *She went **from** London*. Examples like A: *Where did Mary leave?* B: *She left London* aren't quite ungrammatical, but they are irrelevant, because *leave*, unlike *go*, *fly*, or *take someone to*, takes a location as a proper direct object. (In any case, I'd expect A's question to elicit responses about motion through, such as *She left via the front door*.)My question is this: Does this phenomenon have a standard name or a generally accepted analysis? In particular, are *where*, *here*, and *there* in the above examples better understood as adverbs, more akin to *how*, rather than as the objects of otherwise intransitive verbs? And is there a more precise explanation than mine of the semantic restrictions on the prepositional phrases that *where* can replace?

Answer 1

Your question is a well thought out one. My response is a little out of the box, maybe to you simplistic, but here goes. Pay attention to your instincts, which from a number of examples you give are good, and eliminate any unnecessary words whether in a simple dialog or in longer writing.

Answer 2

I hope this answer helps:

You're asking about "this phenomenon," but referring to a few different phenomena in your examples, so there are some nuances that are different for different parts of your question.

The short answer is yes, "where" and "there" are not just better understood as adverbs, they are adverbs, even though they're not the kind of words we usually think of as adverbs. They modify verbs, so they are adverbs.

The questions you have about the "to" and "from" phrases are best answered by pointing out that "to where" and "to there" used to be expressed by the words "whither" and "thither," and likewise, "whence" and "thence" for the respective "from" phrases. So "whither do you go?" "To London." "Whence do you come?" "From York." You still see it occasionally if someone is casting out demons or some such and says "return from whence you came!" (even though "from whence" is redundant). So analytically, it's probably clearest to say that we have generally replaced "whither" and "whence" with "where."

I would argue that in the "beside" examples, because they don't involve motion, but rather location, "where" is standing in for the location, and locations are often defined with prepositions. "Where's Jean?" "In Paris." "Where's Juliet?" "On the balcony." "Where's the troll?" "Under the bridge."

The basic idea is that prepositional phrases function adverbially in sentences.

Mary left WITH HER RABBIT.

They threw milkshakes AT THE POLITICIAN.

I looked AROUND.

In all of those cases, the prepositional phrase is modifying the verb, and "where," "when," and "how" all stand in for prepositional phrases.