“Have been to see a film” and “got back from doing six laps”: temporal use of two English motion verb constructions

Cross-linguistically, temporal and aspectual notions are often interpreted in spatial terms. In particular, the concept of ‘course of event’ tends to be represented as a path, and encoded through motion verbs followed by verbal complements expressing metaphorical destinations (e.g. "I can’t bring myself to tell my parents my bad test results; I came to realise the problem was mechanical; Are you going to leave soon?"). English motion verb constructions allowing a temporal reinterpretation of this kind include "HAVE been to V" (e.g. "He said he had been to buy a packet of tabs") and "got back from V-ing" (e.g. "I’ve just got back from coaching the French Under 15s in the ECC championships in Rome"), which can be glossed as ‘having just V-ed’. This paper examines co-text of use of the above constructions on the basis of data collected from the British English Web Corpus (ukWaC; 1,500,000,000 words). "HAVE been to V" and "got back from V-ing" often co-occur with verbs of visual perception, mostly "see", and strongly correlate with the meanings of ‘examining/watching something’ and ‘paying a visit’, but more generally, they are associated with the representation of events classifiable as errands (exchanges of information/services, tasks, jobs). The data shows that "HAVE been to V" and "got back from V-ing" (a) represent processes of varying temporal nature (i.e. telic like "watch the game"; punctual like "take", and durative like "stay"), but compatible with the boundedness of the motional meaning of ‘going somewhere and returning’; (b) are associated with human, volitional subjects; (c) represent deliberate acts requiring a temporary change of location; (d) and express the notion of ‘coming back from getting something done’. Overall, the constructions simultaneously express both the spatial and the temporal facets characterizing given events. Their use as expressions of recent past (i.e. ‘having just V-ed’) is restricted to those cases where the notions of both round-trip motion and past performance can be said to co-exist or persist. This suggests that "HAVE been to V" and "got back from V-ing" either are in the infancy of their grammaticalization or illustrate instances of static grammaticalization, namely the entrenched, but marginal, use of lexical items in grammatical functions.