Expressing the future with movement verbs

[flautert]

My former chinese teacher told us we can express future with 去. Now I am self-studying and never came across a sentence with 去 with simple future - it always involves some movement.

Can one use 去 for a future action when you remain unmoved, like in "I will close my eyes"?

Also, what about this sentence:
我也来介绍一下!

Wǒ yě lái jièshào yīxià!

I'll also introduce myself!
Is 来 being used to express the future in this sentence? Or this really means the person in literaly coming to introduce herself?

Thanks!

[Angelina]

This is what I am working on. Not sure if I will be able to finish it since my program is taught in Chinese and I am a perfectionist. 

 

来 and 去 can be used to talk about time, more precisely temporal contouring. 

 

 

我也来介绍一下  is a bit like 我们来讨论 and 我来 (when you want to do something instead of your friend).

I am not sure if these are the right examples when it comes to talking about time, I think these examples are more about modality than time.

 

Quote

More precisely, modality is signaled by grammatical expressions (moods) that express a speaker's general intentions (or illocutionary point) as well as the speaker's commitment to how believable, obligatory, desirable, or actual an expressed proposition is.

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_modality

 

 

 

 

13 hours ago, flautert said:

去 with simple future - it always involves some movement.

 

It does not always involve actual physical movement. 来  and 去 can be grammaticalized into aspectual markers. My favourite example is -起来.

 

唱起歌来 

to start singing 

 

 

Here -起来 is used to mark inchoative aspect,  it is not future like future tense, but it is still used to talk about the temporal contouring of an event. There is no physical getting up. Beginners might find it confusing, because you are lucky to have had a teacher who told you about this, it is not covered in textbooks, at least not enough, I am not surprised that people get confused. 

The -起来 in  唱起歌来  does not involve movement, hence -来  does not always involve some movement. 

 

 

[Mati1]

1 hour ago, Angelina said:

唱起歌来

 

When 起来 is used this way (with a separable expression) is 起 neutral or third tone?

[evn108]

16 hours ago, flautert said:

Is 来 being used to express the future in this sentence? Or this really means the person in literaly coming to introduce herself?

This isn't a linguistic explanation at all, and someone else please correct me if I'm wrong, but my sense of this is kind of like saying "go ahead and..." in English, like, "OK, now I'll go ahead and introduce myself, too." Or "Why don't I introduce myself now too." I'm sure there's a fancier way to describe what phrases like this are actually doing (like Angelina says above) but to me it just makes it sound friendlier and more colloquial even if it's hard to translate exactly what it 'means.'

[陳德聰]

The simple answer no. The complex answer is “sort of”.

[flautert]

Thank you all a lot for your answers.

But I cannot say I understand it fully now. I guess I will have to learn by seeing these constructions many times, then I will start to grasp their subtleties 

(as for most of the complex constructions in chinese). 

[Angelina]

13 hours ago, flautert said:

I guess I will have to learn by seeing these constructions many times, then I will start to grasp their subtleties 

(as for most of the complex constructions in chinese). 

 

 

Not really. You just have not been able to find the right resources to learn how the Chinese language works. It is fine to learn by practice (trial-and-error), many other learners have done it before, but this is a strenuous, time-consuming, thing to do. 

 

There might be a difference between (a) relevant literature where linguists communicate with other linguists, and (b) literature meant for absolute beginners. The first one (a) is not impossible to understand, still, it would be nice to have more things meant for beginners, with less technical terminology. This kind of terminology can be confusing for beginners. Perhaps it is possible to find a way to translate findings from linguistics into a more simplified language beginners would be able to understand.