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In:The Progressive Revisited: Historical and Quantitative Studies in Germanic and Romance Languages
Edited by Alessandro Carlucci and Jerzy Nykiel
[Studies in Language Companion Series 236] 2025
► pp. 126–158

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The go Ving network in twenty-first century English

 | University of Santiago de Compostela
Published online: 12 September 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.236.05fan
Abstract
This chapter addresses the English go Ving pattern, as in A helicopter blade goes scissoring through the air or We went fishing every weekend. The analysis is based on decade 2010–2019 of COHA and on several corpora of British English covering the period 1470–1994. Evidence from these sources shows that the go Ving pattern constitutes a family of closely interconnected form-meaning pairings, or constructions, in the Construction Grammar sense (Goldberg 1995). A process of auxiliation over several centuries has led to the emergence and spread of a constellation of related constructions expressing various categories of aspect (absentive, inchoative, iterative, progressive) and modality (admonitive). Also examined is the interrelation between the schemas that comprise the go Ving network and the quasi-serial go V pattern seen in sequences such as Three times a week after school I go visit my dad.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical background
  • 3.Earlier research on the go Ving pattern
    • 3.1Synchronic studies
    • 3.2Diachronic studies
      • 3.2.1The go Progressive
      • 3.2.2Admonitive go
      • 3.2.3Expeditionary go
  • 4.The go V pattern
  • 5.Data sources
  • 6.Analysis and discussion
    • 6.1Admonitive, expeditionary and progressive uses (569 tokens)
    • 6.2Inchoative and iterative uses (15 tokens)
    • 6.3Purposive uses (122 tokens)
    • 6.4Idioms (104 tokens)
    • 6.5Variation between go Ving and go V
  • 7.Summary and conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
References (58)
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