Most of us know that the future simple tense can be expressed informally by using “going to” in place of will or shall. Regard:
I will/shall go eat now.
I am going to eat now.
In fact, this usage probably dominates in casual conversation. Then I started thinking about what should happen to this construction when the thing that I am going to do is GO.
I am going to go to work tomorrow.
I am going to go eat now.
Both sentences work just fine without “go”. The word certainly seems redundant or at least superfluous. Are there any situations where the “go” is needed after “going to”?
If you remove “tomorrow” from this sentence, then the “to go” is not redundant: “I am going to work” means “I am doing it right now”, while “I am going to go to work” means “I will do it in the future”.
It’s just a quirk that a progressive present with a word that explicitly specifies when the action is happening “counts” as a future tense.
It’s grammatically correct, but just clumsy word usage in my view. Unfortunately there’s really not a better way to say it aloud that doesn’t sound stilted, though it’s less awkward in written speech: “I’m preparing to go to work now.” or “I plan to leave for work in a few minutes.”
Aside: I grew up in a rural southern town, and sometimes the grammar was atrocious. Particularly grating to my ears was the use of the word “done” — “I done forgot my book,” or “I done made the cake,” for example. This led to the often-repeated shortened phrase of “I done done it.” Arggh!
“I am going to go to work tomorrow” means “I will travel to my office and perform my work tomorrow”.
“I am going to work tomorrow” is ambiguous :
Meaning 1: “I will be going to work tomorrow”, same as above.
Meaning 2: “I am gonna work tomorrow” , which means “I will perform my work tomorrow” without the notion of travel. Could be a home office.
Same thing with the “go eat” sentence. The full sentence indicates that I need to travel (to a room or across town) before I eat. Without the “go”, I could be sitting in the kitchen with a sandwich in front of me.
Same here. And the sentences don’t sound clumsy at all to me. (“Gonna go” and “going to go” is used quite freely in my dialect, so it sounds perfectly naturaly.) The alternatives, on the other hand, are a bit stilted.
Bada bing. I suppose you can say “I’m going to go to work” to mean you’re going to do it right now, but I wouldn’t. Seems silly and redundant, but yes, if we’re discussing future, I’d totally say “I’m going to go to work tomorrow,” though “I’m going to work tomorrow” works just as well.
Go/going is properly used as an auxiliary verb as well as a main verb, so I think it’s fine to use both together. As Johanna pointed out, when used as the auxiliary verb “going to” is elided into “gonna”, but never when used as the main verb. “I’m gonna the store,” would be unintelligible to a native speaker, who could nevertheless easily understand, “I’m gonna go to the store now.”
Until I taught English to foreign speakers, I never even realized an elision was happening. My students were baffled by “I’m gonna” phrases, and it took me awhile to realize that I taught it as “going to” and was expecting them to understand it as “gonna”. English is called a “time stress” language, which means we destress (mumble), speed up, and even change the pronunciations of words that aren’t of prime importance to the meaning of the whole sentence. I sure there are other languages that do this, but I actually don’t know of any.
The one counterexample I can think of would be John Lennon’s song “Meat City” from the album Mind Games. Song has the line:
Well I’m gonna China to see for myself, just gotta get me some rock ‘n’ roll
and later repeats
Well I’m gonna China, gonna China, gonna China…
Thing is, though, Lennon actually pronounces the verb as [ˈgoʊənə]. Which, although it’s a bit slurred, I think is intelligible to most English speakers as a contraction of “going to” meaning traveling to a place. The transcription “gonna” would normally be read as [ˈgʌnə] (stressed) or [gənə] (unstressed). Whoever chose to spell Lennon’s colloquial pronunciation verb that way, whether Lennon himself or some record company flunky assigned to transcribe lyrics off of the recording, didn’t make a very good choice of spelling, if you ask me.
You can use going to go for predictions where you’re pretty certain about what will happen, based on evidence in front of you. “He’s going to go past him.” (In a race). He’s going past him would have a completely different meaning in that context.
Similarly, “I’m going to the pub tomorrow” sounds a little more definite than “I’m going to go to the pub tomorrow.” In some contexts that’s more obvious than others - “some day, we’re going to go to hawaii” sounds more tentative than “some day, we’re going to hawaii.” It’s the form usually used for talking about dreams and aspirations.
In other contexts, people sometimes use “going to go” because there’s kinda a cultural bias against sounding too definite, and, like I said, “going to go” is more tentative.
I love the “done done” phrase, for no particularly good reason. I first picked it up from Li’l Abner.
I used to work as a sysadmin in a university-like environment, where one might suppose people knew decent grammar. I was expected to write a brief memo each week describing what tasks I had accomplished. I always titled it “What I Done Done This Week”, to the amusement of all.
I take issue with this. I can’t imagine any situation or context where “I am going to [verb]” implies the present continuous tense.
Even if I “am going to eat” as soon as I submit this post, and my food is sitting right here in front of me, it is still a future action. Granted it’s the immediate future that is just moments away, but that is still the future tense.
Nor can I find any textbook that supports that usage, and I have several dozen scattered around me right now.
