“Don’t go getting into trouble again!”
The emergence and diachrony of the English Go VPing construction
Building on Goldberg’s (2006: 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 et al. 1994: 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
-
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Cited by
Cited by 1 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.
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