I am going to go to the Doctor’s surgery tomorrow.
I have to have a blood test.
Both of the above sentences are common, normal usage, at least in British English (not sure about other dialects)
Of course they don’t really contain a repeated verb because in the first case, ‘going to’ means ‘intending to’ - and in the second, ‘have to’ means ‘must’.
Are there other English verbs that work like this - perhaps in other dialects than mine?
Does this happen at all in non-English languages? (for example, I know macht in German means ‘make’, but also means more generically ‘do’ - but does it ever appear twice in succession as a result of this?)
In Japanese, “mite mite” would be used to invite someone to “take a look for yourself” through a telescope, etc. Both instances are verbs: “to look” combined in a form that suggests an invitation to attempt an action (the action of looking, in this case)
“Going to go” is just one particular case of a more general construct: “Going to <verb>” to express an intention to do something in the future. Idiomatically, it’s actually the more common way we express the future tense in English. In “Going to go”, the second verb “go” just happens to be the verb that is being expressed in the future tense. As noted above, this construct is used in Spanish too.
Thai has various common multi-meaning verbs that might be combined in such a fashion, but most such constructions would be avoided as awkward. {ให้ /hai/} can mean to give or to permit, so one common non-awkward example (and my native-speaking informants agree) would be (in answer to a question “Why did you give money to that guy?”):
Of course, besides being highly contrived, that well-known example is a little bit bogus: It contains some quoted text, which of course could be anything with no context. And it’s also, really, two separate sentences semi-colon spliced; some might call that cheating.
Different in that the first structure is not modal, as above, and that the verbs are different with respect to… something… maybe aspect? But something arguably related is going on:
*I looked to see if a car was coming.
I went to go check on it.*
They sound rather quaint to me. Maybe they’re non-standard dialect?
(I know bob++ set this up deliberately, but I’ll bite.)
Wouldn’t the sentence ‘I want to put a hyphen between the words Fish and And and And and Chips in my Fish-and-Chips sign’ have been clearer if quotation marks had been placed before Fish, and between Fish and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and Chips, as well as after Chips?