ratcreature | help me find an English grammar rule?

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help me find an English grammar rule?

In English with some verbs you can use their ing-form after go, i.e. sentences like "I go running often", "we are going shopping" etc., but with other verbs this is not allowed, i.e. you don't say "we are going eating"(*) but "we are going (out) to eat".

I think the rule is that the construction is only allowed with movement verbs, like go walking, swimming, dancing, etc. all work, but not with reading, knitting or painting. I'm actually unsure about playing, but I think not? OTOH working and hunting seem okay in the construction?

I tried finding the rule for this in grammar explanations but I'm not even sure whether the -ing is considered a gerund or a present participle here. So I was hoping that maybe the English language geeks on my f-list could point me.

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unhelpful: this is basically English fucking with you. it does that a lot.

True. It is sneaky about it too. Like, looking at it at first you think "this isn't so bad" (except for the erratic spelling, everybody notices that is bad right away): Barely any inflections to memorize with the verbs and nouns, no gendered articles to memorize etc. so it makes you think it is harmless. And then ambushes you with a crapton of totally random stuff you have to memorize in the less obvious places if you ever want to use the verbs and nouns for which you didn't have to memorize many forms.

I will try to figure out where I put my copy of A Short Course in Grammar (by Paul Hopper, who I was fortunate to have for Grammar of Standard Written English in grad school). His position, by the by, is that spoken English grammar is a giant nightmare.

Most natural languages' grammars seem to be. Probably for the same reasons that old, organically grown code tends to become horrible with all the added bits that made sense at some point? Only they had much longer to become a mess.

I don't have a technical explanation, but here goes. It is 80% likely that I have just made up an explanation that meets the examples in my brain, so I welcome challenges to the idea.

Unfortunately "we're going out drinking" is totally a thing you can say. I think the problem with the eating construction is in the expectation of duration. I suppose one *could* eat for hours, but that is typically not the case. (Most people also only run or walk or swim for half an hour, but you... Could?)

More specifically, I would also not say "we're going voting," rather only, "we're going to vote"

Going hunting is definitely a thing, both socially and for food. Going to hunt sounds like the apocalypse has struck and I am going to bring home dinner. Going working is not a thing, only going to work (which, again, might be the time boundary/goal thing.)

I should also have said, in this case the part of speech is the present participle, in the continuous sense.

I'm going hunting - present participle.
Hunting helps to feed your family - gerund.

I'm glad you said this because I was about to blithely suggest it's gerunds all the way down.

An ESL grammar article someone on LJ linked me which discusses this says these constructions are go + gerund:
http://www.eslcafe.com/grammar/verbs_other_verbs08.html

Though an ESL grammar article someone on LJ linked me which discusses this says these constructions are go + gerund:
http://www.eslcafe.com/grammar/verbs_other_verbs08.html

But you can read, sleep or knit for hours, and the construction isn't really used for those either afaik.

I thought about this in the shower trying to figure out why it works that way and what verbs it works on, and here's the best explanation I've been able to come up with:

I think the problem here is that it's not a grammatical category of verbs, but a conceptual category -- that is, unless there's an exception I'm not thinking of (which there probably is, because ... English) it's that the "ing" verb here is describing an activity that you go away to do, and there is an implied "to go" in the sentence that's not being said.

The ambiguity is (possibly) happening because "to go" in English (as in French; I know zip about German grammar, so I don't know if you guys have the same thing) is BOTH a regular verb meaning to go somewhere, and an auxiliary verb to indicate the future tense. When I think about which verbs the "going shopping" construction works on, and which it doesn't, I think what's happening is that there is supposed to be an extra "to go" in the sentence which is being combined with the auxiliary verb, so it does the work of both. For example, it is grammatical to say "I am going to go shopping" or "I am going to go dancing" but most people don't -- it sounds a little more formal. But I think the way English speakers parse the sentence is that there's a whole concept implied ("to go dancing" or "to go shopping") which is different from just "to dance" or "to shop". Like, "to go dancing" implies that you're going out to a club or party, that you'll be out for awhile, etc. Whereas "to dance" is something you can do in your living room, without all those other connotations. It doesn't work with "to go reading" or "to go knitting" not because it's strictly ungrammatical but because the conceptual category of knitting as "a thing you go out and do somewhere" doesn't exist. You can say "I am going to [verb]" for just about any verb, but you can't say "I am going to go [verbing]" for any verb that doesn't belong to that concept-group of verbs that have a special place you go to do them and a special set of activities you do while you're there.

... does that make sense?

Another thought that occurred to me is that if you think of the "-ing" verb as standing in for a special activity you go to a certain place to do, and that there's a missing "to go" in the sentence (or possibly a whole slew of missing helper words -- "to go to the dance" becomes "dancing", etc), you can coin new, grammatical-sounding ones by tacking an "-ing" onto the name of the place you do it, or some other noun that can easily stand in as a synecdoche for the whole activity. For example, "I'm going clubbing" is a thing people actually say (instead of "I'm going to go to a club"). You could say "I'm going librarying this afternoon" -- this is not a thing people say, but it would sound to native English speakers (at least it does to me) like a cute neologism instead of a mistake: all the same connotations are there (I'm going to the library, to do the things one normally does at a library). If you were at the beach and said "I'm going seashelling; anyone want to come?" that's not an actual, existing verb for "to look for seashells", but it doesn't sound wrong.

Hm. So it's a kind of verbing, you think?

I wonder how many languages verb. I don't know any others well enough to know.

I think it is! And as per the below comment, I think possibly it's actually re-verbing a noun, instead of using the verb form -- or at least that might be how the grammar is getting parsed in the brain. All the verbs I can think of that work for this are verbs that are also nouns ("a dance", "a walk", "a hunt", etc). And you can also do it with nouns, but not with other parts of speech. So perhaps it is actually a noun modification, disguised as a verb.

Edited 2016-05-25 19:38 (UTC)

Yeah, I mean -- we verb a lot, in this language. We go mushrooming! And birding! And I have a friend who is into bearding!

So I think you may be right -- it's something that LOOKS like a normal verb form but it's actually a reverb'd noun.

WTF is bearding? Growing a beard? Styling one? Just having one?

"Bearding" is actually from Middle English: it means to face down or oppose!

And that is a hobby like birding?

That is a different bearding. This bearding comes from having a beard on one's face. (In this context, interestingly, you need not grow your own beard. You may use a fake beard. I have a woman friend who competes with fake beards.)

Bearding is the entire wide wide world of competitive beard stuff. Grooming, competitions, etc. I have a friend who is an international-level competitor. IIRC he came in 4th in the world for freestyle natural beard last year.

Okay, I am now really curious to find out what bearding is exactly, because I've never heard of it, but going off the general pattern of the other ones, I would expect it would involve not just growing a beard but participating in, I guess you'd say, beard subculture -- styling a beard, sharing beard pictures with other beard enthusiasts, keeping track of the growth of your beard, something like that. So now I'm curious if I'm right.

It seems like another thing all of the different uses of this grammatical construction have in common is that they imply doing the thing in a particular culture-specific way that is NOT implied by using the verb by itself -- like, if someone says they're "going dancing", you don't assume they are a member of the ballet and are performing tonight, or that they are going over to a friend's house and dancing to the radio. They probably mean going out to a nightclub or something like that. They're not just doing the activity, but participating in the culture of it. I'm not sure if that's true of every single use of it, but it seems to hold for all the ones I can think of off the top of my head.

Edited 2016-05-26 00:52 (UTC)

Yes! You are correct. With the addition of competition. See, for example:
http://thecanam.com

My friend is 2nd place in "Partial Beard". I also know the "Full Beard Natural – 6 inches or More" winner.

In German you can turn nouns into verbs as well, but it is not done as readily as in English, because you have to add suffixes and such to make it fit. The other direction is easier. Though if the noun came into German from English recently and it is verbed in English, often it is in German as well. Like snowboard is a verb in German too (snowboarden) instead of saying "ride a snowboard" (Snowboard fahren).

Yeah, I considered something like that. That would explain why a sentence like "I often go reading in the library." seems okay(-ish?), whereas without the place it's odd.

German does not have continuous/progressive aspects but needs an adverb to indicate that like "I am reading" would be "ich lese gerade" (though there are colloquial forms in some regional dialects that are equivalent, e.g. you can say "ich bin am Lesen" which originates in the Rhineland dialects but has become accepted fairly widely in spoken standard German, and in some Bavarian dialects you can say "ich tu lesen" which just sounds wrong in standard). German also doesn't use "to go" as auxiliary. In normal speech German just uses present tense for future actions. German does have a future tense like the one in English with "will" but if context is clear and especially in spoken language you just use the present.

However, a similar construction like "to go dancing" or "to go shopping" exists in German as well, analog to the one in English, only (since there are no -ing forms) with the infinitive "ich gehe tanzen" and "ich gehe einkaufen" for example. But in German you can do it with some different words too, like in German to go out to eat is "essen gehen", sort of like in English, only with the "out" implied (probably because "ausgehen" in German means going on a date specifically). So the very similar usage in German doesn't have exactly the same rules.

Yeah, the "reading at the library" one doesn't sound wrong to me. Now that I'm thinking about it, I think maybe the noun part is the key. While I'm not entirely sure if the -ing form in these examples is a gerund or a participle or something else entirely, I'm pretty sure that all the verbs you can do this with also have a noun form (there is such a thing as a dance, a walk, a hunt, a shop, etc) but none of the other ones do (there's not "a read", "an eat", etc). So maybe the rule is: if it's also a noun, you can do this, and if not, you can't.

Although I also think the "English is just fucking with us" explanation above is probably the best one ...

And that makes sense for German - thanks! I'm not sure why English is so complicated with its verbs; well, there's probably some convoluted explanation involving Angles and Saxons and French way back in the mists of medieval England, but it seems like our tenses are a convoluted mess, even the everyday ones.

Yeah English is a bit finicky as to what can be noun. In German for example a meal is "ein Essen" because "to eat" is "essen", so German has no problem with that one. Though read can be a noun in English as in "This book is a good read." Which incidentally doesn't work in German. Closely related, yet arbitrarily different enough to provide pitfalls for learners.

German is really interesting in all the ways it can turn verbs into nouns, some of which I really miss in English, in particular the ones that add shades of meaning, like in German you can make a verb into a noun in a value neutral way, and in a pejorative way. With "to dance" (tanzen), you have "the dance" (der Tanz), "the dancing" ("das Tanzen") but in German you can also form "das Getanze" and "die Tanzerei" and the latter two are negative nouns.

My guess: English stole half its verbs from other languages, and only carried off about half the grammatical rules with them. (And that's half of each verb's rules, not all of the rules of half of the verbs, to boot!)

I think you're on to something with away->location + activity.

It seems to be a combo:

-Is it a verb that is also a noun? (go on a walk -> go walking; go to a shop -> shopping; ride in a sleigh -> go sleighing. But you can't 'do a read,' ergo you can't go reading. (You can, technically, "have a read [on it]" but that's not not the same as reading.) Oddly, however, one can 'do a reread'! Therefore should be able to go rereading, except...

-Is it performed in a location that isn't your home/your current general location? (We live on land, so getting in the water is to "go swimming"; we don't live in shops, so we can "go shopping." But we do eat in our homes, so we can't "go eating," we have to specify that we will "go out to eat." Rereading is something one can do at home, so "go rereading" won't work because it fails this element.)

Edited 2016-05-26 02:24 (UTC)

Hmm, yeah. Though the go vs. "go out" still seems random to me in practice. Like in German where "essen gehen" always means to go out to eat there is never any confusion with that similar construction. If you want to invite someone to your place you just use "come" instead of go, only usually with the verb a noun as in "zum Essen kommen" (just like the English "come to dinner") though if you say call your kid to the table just "komm essen!" also works, as it does in Enlish with "come eat".

I googled, and one website summed it up as: Sorry, there isn’t a rule. You have to learn which verbs go with which pattern.

https://learnenglishteens.britishcouncil.org/grammar-vocabulary/grammar-videos/verb-ing-or-verb-infinitive

this link is quite interesting and also points out that there is a difference between British English use and American English use in some cases

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/words/verb-tenses-adding-ed-and-ing

Also to add confusion to the mix there's informal and formal use.

how does it go?

spanish and italian: So THESE words are feminine and THESE words are masculine, and you ALWAYS put an adjective AFTER the noun.
french: haha i dont fuckin know man just do whatever
german: LET'S ADD A NEUTRAL NOUN HAHA
english: *shooting up in the bathroom*

It's always something with languages. And yet Esperanto never makes much of a dent.

But you know what is far worse with German than the genders is that plurals are not regular. You don't just have to memorize the article together with the noun, but its plural. There are some regular patterns, but many nouns don't follow, so the only way is to memorize. Not just some exceptions like the English mouse/mice and child/children, German words are almost all like that. And there are six different ways to make a plural (not counting the irregular ones coming from Latin and Greek imports), so no lack of choice.

Actually for many nouns there are competing plurals. Sometimes that changes the meaning (e.g. in German "the bank" and "the bench" are both "die Bank" but banks are "Banken" yet benches are "Bänke"). Sometimes there are regional differences. Sometimes as native speaker you don't know which plural to use, and often words adopted from other languages shift their plural as they become common.

Edited (typo) 2016-05-26 08:32 (UTC)

Found this: http://www.eslcafe.com/grammar/verbs_other_verbs08.html

Thanks! That's helpful. (I think I never made the leisure time connection because I find shopping for anything a fairly awful chore, lol.)

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help me find an English grammar rule?

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