Tomorrow I’ll go (a) shopping: on the history of the Expeditionary Go construction and its relation to the absentive

Abstract

Abstract Work on Construction Grammar and Diachronic Construction Grammar has foregrounded the idea that constructions are organized as a network of interconnected form-meaning pairs. This article explores the history of the construction exemplified in the title, henceforth referred to as the Expeditionary Go construction, and its relation both to other members of the small family of English go-constructions and to the prepositional be-progressive (e.g., 1700, They were a hunting). The analysis traces the development of expeditionary go since Old English times and argues that it was a device conveying the Subject’s remoteness from the speaker-oriented deictic centre. This function has remained basically unchanged over the course of the history of English, but the form of expeditionary clauses has been adjusted as a result of profound language-internal and language-external developments; these developments have brought expeditionary clauses and other members of the network of go-constructions, most especially admonitive clauses (Don’t go peeping like that!), closer together.