help me find an English grammar rule?

[ratcreature]

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.

Comments

[sholio]

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?

[sholio]

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.

[laurajv]

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.

[sholio]

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.

[laurajv]

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.

[ratcreature]

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

[saraht]

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

[ratcreature]

And that is a hobby like birding?

[laurajv]

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.)

[laurajv]

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.

[sholio]

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.

bearding

[laurajv]

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.

[ratcreature]

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).

[ratcreature]

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.

[sholio]

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.

[ratcreature]

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.

[krait]

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!)

[brownbetty]

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