Johanna offers a lot insightful analysis about the "go + X-ing" construction.

Johanna Rubba wrote:

> 'To go Xing' means, to me, something like 'to engage in an activity
> type', 'to undertake an activity type'. The activity type is a
> culturally conventional activity, often a leisure pursuit, although
> certain chore-type activities occur in the construction ('go
> food-shopping', 'go appliance hunting').  We go shopping, go
> ice-skating, go birdwatching, go jogging, go sailing, go hiking, etc.
> 'Go' sounds odder with other activity types. We don't 'go housecleaning'
> or 'go bank-robbing' or 'go murdering' or 'go babysitting' or 'go
> data-entering' or 'go working'. Note how different the implication is in
> these two sentences:
>
> I went driving yesterday.   implies a pleasure ride
> I drove yesterday.      is neutral; it could have been for any purpose.
>
> I went driving to work yesterday.  implies a combination of pleasure
> ride with mundane must-do getting to work.
>
> 'Go bank-robbing' improves considerably if we imagine that robbing banks
> is someone's favorite leisure activity.

I agree with Johanna that this construction appears to have some semantic constraint
on the verbs which can be placed in the "X-ing" position.

I don't have a great knowledge of German, but it has a very similar construction
with a very similar semantic constraint.  Like English, it is decidedly odd in
German to say

        I am going reading.

unless that is an activity like reading books for the blind.  (I have confirmed
these intuitions with my wife, a native-speaker of German.)

To my knowledge, this construction is impossible in French. In fact in French to say
"go shopping" (which is also possible in German), one says "faire les courses"
literally "make/do the rounds."  What is interesting is faire is used in French to
say play tennis, faire du tennis, to ski, faire du skiing and to go horseback
riding, faire du cheval which is literally "make/do some horse."

There is something idiomatic about these kinds of constructions to indicate "to
engage in an activity."   I know that I learned about the constructions in German
and French as kinds of idioms.  However, it is at this point, because of some
fundamental differences in how we understand the nature of language, I depart with
Johanna's claim about a connection of language to culture.


>  Cultural information often is part of the meaning of a
> construction, if not its total raison d'etre. And that cultural
> information determines its accurate use.
>
> Semantics (if culture is part of semantics, and how could it not be) and
> syntax are inseparable.

I have no idea how such a sweeping claim can be maintained.  There is something
within the underlying "logic" of go in English and its relative gehen in German
which allows one to "go X-ing" or "gehen Xen."  It would appear that is not possible
with the French word for "go" but is possible for the French word for "do/make."

If Johanna's hypothesis about semantics is right, this difference between go/gehen
and faire reveals something fundamentally different about the German-English culture
and Gallic culture.  I have no idea what that might be.  I know that in the States
and the UK when I go shopping or in Germany when ich einkaufen gehe or in France
when je fait les courses I feel I am doing exactly the same activity although the
products are not the same.

Bob Yates
Central Missouri State University

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