Bill,

I think it would be fun to have students from 9th grade on up play with 
which verbs sound right in the "go Xing" construction, and looking for 
what they have in common meaning-wise. If they've been doing a lot of 
examination of language, I'd bet some kids would come up with things 
like recreational activities that involve some kind of movement or 
travel, esp. with a teacher to give hints. Activities like this call for 
putting one's everyday knowledge under a microscope -- zeroing in 
closely and really looking at detail and thinking about it. My students 
find this terribly effortful. Why? Because they haven't been asked to do 
it enough;  something killed off their natural curiosity about the world 
and themselves at some point in their lives.

Doing this probably seems unlikely to a lot of people, because they 
don't think of grammar instruction as a kind of discovery play -- 
playing with language (e.g., trying out different verbs in "go X-ing") 
and discovering what they already know. If more of us thought of grammar 
this way, it would no doubt be lots more fun for both students and 
teachers. Very young kids play with language all the time, making jokes 
with it in many ways. My 3-yr-old friend gets a huge kick out of calling 
everyone in her circle by someone else's name. A simple game, but they 
get more sophisticated as kids get older.

Several of my students read a book (for a book report assignment this 
term) called "Language Play", by David Crystal. There's a section on 
child language play and how it is very sad that that kind of play stops 
in school and becomes drills focused on getting it right.

As to "go X-ing", the point is that I'm NOT analyzing it as "go camp" + 
"-ing". The construction is "go X-ing"; the "go" is mutable for tense 
and aspect; the "X-ing" is not. Which verbs can go into the X slot is 
restricted by semantics: the verb has to designate an activity which 
involves multiple actions or sustained action over a path.

The particular aspectual quality comes from a combination of the "go" 
with the verb semantics.

There are two possibilities I see for use of the -ing verb form in this 
construction: one is that it is the gerund functioning as the name of 
the activity, just as it does when subject: "House-hunting is hell." 
Another is that the -ing form is supplying imperfective aspect, 
foregrounding the spread of the activity over a stretch of time/space, 
as the present participle does in progressive constructions like "the 
child is eating".

I enjoy playing around with these ideas in my head, but questions like 
this can only be resolved by looking at the constructions in lots of 
data and testing the construction for acceptability in various 
permutations. The first thing to do is to see if someone else has 
already invented this particular wheel. All of what I have said so far 
about this construction is armchair linguistics, which I increasingly 
feel is a plague of lists like this.

My students don't seem to have trouble grasping the existence of 
numerous kinds of lexical items, from prefixes and suffixes to 
collocations (fixed expressions that mean what they say, like "brush 
one's teeth" vs. "clean one's teeth" -- just habitual ways of expressing 
ideas -- the first is USA, the second British) to idioms. They also can 
understand verb-particle constructions (prepositional verbs) like "run 
up a bill" and contrast them by grammatical tests with "run up a hill" 
(the first allows "run it up", the second does not). "Go X-ing" is just 
another fixed lexical expression.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Johanna Rubba   Associate Professor, Linguistics
English Department, California Polytechnic State University
One Grand Avenue  • San Luis Obispo, CA 93407
Tel. (805)-756-2184  •  Fax: (805)-756-6374 • Dept. Phone.  756-2596
• E-mail: [log in to unmask] •      Home page: 
http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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