goesoccurs

Goesoccurs is a neologism used in event-semantics and narratology to describe a proposed relation between motion expressions and the actualization of events. In analyses that distinguish movement toward a goal from the completion of an event, goesoccurs marks the moment when movement toward an endpoint contributes to or coincides with the event’s realization rather than merely describing the movement.

Origin and usage: The term was coined in the 2010s by researchers exploring how movement verbs interact with telic event structure. It is typically employed in theoretical discussions, cross-linguistic surveys, and some constructed-language grammars. The name is a compound of "goes" and "occurs," signaling its functional pairing of motion and event realization.

Semantics and diagnostics: Goesoccurs is analyzed as a relation between a motion predicate and an event predicate E, such that there exists a time t where a moving toward a goal and the occurrence of E are tightly linked. It is not standard English syntax; rather, a formal tool in linguistic analysis. It may be invoked to explain certain narrative sequences in which a character’s movement is used to indicate the onset of an event.

Examples: In a formal representation, goesoccurs(e) holds if movement toward a endpoint is correlated with the instantiation of e. In discourse, a sentence like “they proceed toward the site, and the incident goesoccurs at arrival” illustrates the proposed timing linkage.

Criticism and alternatives: Some scholars question the empirical basis for goesoccurs, arguing that it overgeneralizes cross-linguistic data or confuses motion with event initiation. Others see it as a useful abstraction for modeling onset and progression in narratives and in certain languages. See also: event structure, telicity, aspect, motion verbs.