到 ... 去 structure

[freefall]

I happened upon this structure in my pocket dictionary... don't understand it.

我到北京去

dao beijing qu

(go to beijing)

How does it work? Is it purely idiomatic / fundamental or is there some grammar to it? As far as I can tell it's not a verb complement structure like 回去 huiqu or a so-called pivotal sentence where the middle word is the object of the first verb and subject of the second. If that were the case, the above sentence would mean 'arrive and beijing and then leave' or something like that.

[freefall]

oops, I posted this and my other recent thread relating to grammar in the wrong forum.. sorry... didn't see a delete button.

MOD: please delete.

[roddy]

Actually, I deleted the one that was in the right place and then moved this one from the wrong place into the right one - but that's because I wasn't paying attention:mrgreen:

[PezDSpencer]

到 in that sentence is more like a preposition than a verb (the distinction between prepositions and verbs in Chinese is more fuzzy than it is in English.) So it's kind of like this;

"I to Beijing go" meaning "I go to Beijing." Of course 到 is a victim of polysemy and has other grammatical functions as well... but in this case it kind of acts like a preposition so it's positioning (along with its object) is before the main verb 去.

[FSO]

到 here is a destination indicator which commonly forms a coverbal phrase with 去 (in this case) or 来 , which indicate direction (going or coming, respectively).

If present, 去 or 来 always constitute the main verb (or part of the main verb, if additional action is involved) in such coverbal phrases, though 到 does not lose its verbal status (it is just not the main verb in the phrase). As PezDSpencer noted, the effective meaning of 到, (though still a verb) is "to".