GO to V: Literal meaning and metaphorical extensions

Motion verbs can literally encode goal-oriented motion ("come to the office; come to the meeting") or metaphorically express a change of state ("come to a decision"), including when they are followed by non-finite complements ("come to say goodbye; come to conclude"). Analysis of about 1,400 corpus concordances reveals that "go to V" mainly encodes its motional meaning, in association with human subjects (88%; "Jeremy goes to answer the door") and, occasionally, four related figurative ones: ‘other-determined transfer or use (of a resource)’ in association with inanimate subjects (3%; "and everything went to pay debts"); ‘contribution to an outcome’ when collocating with verbs denoting involuntary processes (2%; "there are too many factors that go to make up a great marathon runner"); ‘succeeding (in demonstrating)’, if co-occurring with pronominal subjects identifying inanimate, abstract entities, and with the verbs prove or show (6%; "and it just goes to prove anybody can play"); and ‘going on or proceeding (with a course of action)’ in association with human subjects performing deliberate acts not involving physical motion (1%; "we then have to go to develop the job into […] a strategy"). Acceptability judgements expressed by twelve native speakers on 20 sample sentences show that the motional meaning of "go" is also applicable to the construction variant "be going to V" if the scenarios represented express short-term goals. The motional meaning of "go" thus appears to be synchronically relevant to its verbal complements in specific lexico-syntactic environments, allowing metaphorical extensions outside the domain of tense.