Come running: the construction 'lexical verb -ing participle' in a contrastive perspective

Abstract

The paper argues that the pattern 'come/go + -ing form of a motion verb' constitutes a single unit of meaning: although syntactically constructed as the main verb, the path verb acts as a semantically weak catenative component, conveying directional or aspectual meaning, while the formally dependent participle serves as the semantic core of the construction. The delimitation of the boundaries of the unit is based on treating it as a 'translation unit'.

Keywords

• English
• Czech
• motion verbs
• contrative approach
• parallel corpus