Going and Get
My biggest pet peeve of late involves a mismatch in the tense of a subordinate clause. Namely the fact that some people will say thing such as “I’m going to the store and get some milk.” I’ve heard it at least two or three times this autumn already, and that phrase sets off sirens in my head.
Basically, the problem is that people try to use the finite “get” in a sentence whose inflection is already determined by the non-finite “going.” What seems to be the case is that within the conjunction, inflection has to match. Therefore in this situation, where both parts of the sentence are governed by the conjunction “and” they must agree in inflection.
The problem seems to have come from sentences like “I’m going to go to the store and get some milk” which are perfectly grammatical to me. In these cases “go” and “get” are both subordinate to “going to” and as components of a subordinate conjunctional phrase must agree in tense. The confusion of non-finite “going to” for prepositional “to” to mark the location of a “go” action is the cause of my woes. For some reason people cannot figure out that “to” and “to” are different.
Some examples:
I’m going to the store and getting milk.
*I’m going to the store and get milk.
*I’m go to the store and get milk.
I’m going to go to the store and get milk.
*I’m going to going to the store and get milk.
I’m going to be going to the store and getting milk.
Basically the reduction of the redundant sounding “go to” leads to the misunderstanding that “going to” has the same functionality.
