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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?
Not every "to" marks an infinitive:
- on their way to the store
- on their way to victory or defeat
- on their way to doing something
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.
Those countries are killing, or are going to kill, innocent civilians.
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.
To is a sign of the infinitive, but it's also a preposition. Since nouns are the objects of prepositions, gerunds (which take the place of nouns) can appear after to as well.
In the phrase the way to X, to has the meaning of destination. It's the same as saying "The destination of the way is X".
It's not incorrect to say to kill either.
In this case, to is part of the phrase on the way to, which is suggesting that the people he is talking about are engaged in a course of action that if unchecked could or will lead to multiple deaths.
If you wanted to make it easier to understand, you could rephrase it slightly:
... are, or are on the way to, ...
but regardless of one's opinion of Donald Trump, this is not bad grammar :·).
"Killing" is a noun (gerund) in this case. It's perfectly correct grammatically. It's a commonly used construction and quite familiar to me as a native speaker. In this case it means that Russia, Syria and Iran have killed a number of civilians, and that Mr Trump expects that the number killed will eventually be thousands. I was on my way to simply up-voting another response, but I like to hear myself talk.
