To explicate my meaning about semantics, syntax, and culture a bit, for Bob and others (Martha, see below for some Constr. Grammar references): The cultural part of 'go fishing', 'einkaufen gehen' or 'faire des courses' is that certain activities have been categorized together as, roughly, routine leisure activities or routine maintenance duties (such as going shopping). This meaning of 'routine leisure activity' has become conventionally associated with the verb 'go' in English and German, but 'faire' in French. Either verb is a likely candidate, since 'faire' is a very general verb for acting, and 'go' is a very general verb for an initial movement towards another purpose (such as engaging in a routine activity). While we couldn't predict that French would choose 'faire' and other languages 'go' for such constructions, we can see after the fact that the choices make semantic sense. It would be unlikely, for instance, that 'smile' or 'chase' would appear in such constructions, since their meanings are both more specific and not terribly relevant to or compatible with the 'Xing' verb. In other words, a cultural category--a type of activity--has become part of the semantics of a syntactic construction. The cultural category might be the same in all three languages, hence the same 'feeling' Bob reports (though not being a native of either French or German culture, it would be hard to claim that he is necessarily fully in possession of the 'feelings' of natives of these cultures). Language works by conventionalizing the association between a meaning and a form. Sometimes it's single words that express the conventional meaning, sometimes it's a more-complex syntactic construction. I know that seeing the sense of a construction after the fact is not terribly appreciated in some formal theories of language, but it is seen as quite reasonable in functional/cognitive theories. This is one area of difference between these different schools of linguistic thought. In response to Sophie, yes, it has to be the whole construction. The point of my post was that sometimes we understand a construction better by NOT trying to make it compositional (a sum of the meaning of its parts). Sure, we lose comfort, predictability, and order when we 'condemn' the power of syntactic templates, but the nature of language is to not permit such comfort, order, and predictability (infinitive intentionally split). It might be perfectly fine to say that, in 'go Xing' the word 'go' (which is not a copula in any sense of the word as I understand it) is followed by a gerund, but then we must go on to note that not all verbs appear in the X slot, or at least that a certain meaning is conveyed by the construction AS A WHOLE. I attended a presentation at a Cognitive Linguistics conference a week or so ago which gave me a blast of insight about the history of the analysis of language. Most analysts of language, including both modern linguists and traditional grammarians, approached language in the same way. They experienced language in wholes--utterances, texts. They tried to reduce the wholes to parts; they arrived at a set of parts that they then considered the 'atoms' of language, such as parts of speech. They then tried to explain language by coming up with syntactic rules to put the parts back together again. But of course, they were trapped by the set of parts they had come up with in the first place. The whole history of grammar and linguistics has been attempts to come up with the right set of atoms and the right set of rules for putting them together. The insight of this presentation, given by Bill Croft of the U. of Manchester, is that we should not try to reduce the wholes too far in the first place, but we should look at a language as a set of constructions, each of which has certain syntactic properties and expresses certain conventionalized meanings, such as passive constructions or reflexive constructions, etc. We then study such constructions across languages and come up with observations about their properties (Croft is a typologist; typologists specialize in looking at what large numbers of languages have or don't have in common). Croft has a book called 'Radical Construction Grammar' which sets out his ideas (Oxford U press, 2000 or 2001). A book on non-radical Construction Grammar theory is 'A construction grammar approach to argument structure' by Adele Goldberg, U of Chicago Press, 1997. Articles on construction grammar would be found with author names such as Adele Goldberg and Charles Fillmore. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 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 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/