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Article published In: Journal of Historical Pragmatics
Vol. 25:1 (2024) ► pp.33–66

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“Don’t go getting into trouble again!”

The emergence and diachrony of the English Go VPing construction

ORCiD logo with link | University of Santiago de Compostela
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 15 April 2021
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https://doi.org/10.1075/jhp.20006.fan
Abstract
Building on Goldberg’s ( 2006. Constructions at Work. The Nature of Generalization in Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar: 52) observation regarding the existence of “a family of related constructions in English” centred around the verb go, this article explores the history of the construction exemplified in the title (“Don’t go getting into trouble again!”) and its relation to other members of the network of go-constructions. The analysis, conducted using three large corpora, shows that the Go VPing construction emerges from two source constructions (one with an –ing participle following the verb go and the other with an infinitive) which exhibit overlap in terms of certain aspects of their form and meaning. From its earliest attestations in the eighteenth century, the Go VPing construction has grown increasingly more interpersonal, and has become conventionalized as a marker of admonitive mood (Bybee, Joan, Revere Perkins and William Pagliuca. 1994. The Evolution of Grammar: Tense, Aspect, and Modality in the Languages of the World. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar: 321) which serves to dissuade or limit the performance of an activity that is apprehended as undesirable and counter-normative.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Earlier research on the Go VPing construction
  • 3.Theoretical background
  • 4.Data sources
  • 5.Go: Usage and sense development
  • 6.The Go VPing construction and its precursors
    • 6.1The VVingOBL construction
    • 6.2The Not Go-to-Infinitive construction
    • 6.3The Expeditionary Go construction
  • 7.The emergence and development of the Go VPing construction
    • 7.1Late Middle English and Early Modern English (1470s–1690s)
    • 7.2Late Modern English (1710–1920)
    • 7.3Present-Day English (1975–1994)
  • 8.Summing up
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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Cited by (2)

Cited by two other publications

Fanego, Teresa
2023.  Tomorrow I’ll go (a) shopping: on the history of the Expeditionary Go construction and its relation to the absentive. Folia Linguistica 57:s44-s1 ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Fanego, Teresa
2025. The go Ving network in twenty-first century English. In The Progressive Revisited [Studies in Language Companion Series, 236], ► pp. 126 ff. DOI logo

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