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

[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!)