The copula gean stay shares a property with bliuwe stay. Both auxiliaries select a restricted set of bare infinitives, namely the four verbs of body posture (sitte sit, stean stand, lizze lie and hingje hang, see copulas of quasi body posture and aspect for more details). We provide two examples in which the complement of gean go is headed by a verb of body posture:

The verb hingje hang can be both intransitive and transitive, but it is only the intransitive verb which combines with the verb of going. The transitive verb does not combine with the verb of going:

The verb gean go does not combine with subjects which do not have an agentive role, such as inanimate subjects. This explains the following contrast:

Non-agentive subjects require the unaccusative copula of coming followed by a to-infinitive, as in the sentence below (see komme come for more details):

The bare infinitive takes the form of a gerund with the copula of going. An ordinary infinitive is not allowed:

Gean go does not combine with any other bare infinitive apart from the four verbs of body posture, more specifically, it does not combine with some verbs which bliuwe stay combines with and which express permanence (non-change) of location:

The example with wenje live sounds better than the example with stykje stick. Indeed, even nineteenth-century literature occasionally features an example involving wenje live, as in the example below from the writer Waling Dykstra:

The copula gean go is still grounded in a locative interpretation, although it may acquire an overtone of inchoative aspect. In Dutch, this copula is quite generally used for inchoative and future aspect. The locative aspect of gean go in Frisian is visible from the fact that it seems to be more frequently accompanied by a locative phrase than Dutch gaan go, and this correlates with its selectional restrictions, although it is not clear how exactly. Note that the selection restrictions of gean go and other auxiliary verbs are currently changing due to pressure from Dutch, so that spoken language and informal written language may feature violations of the system described here.

Gean go, unlike bliuwe stay, does not combine with verbs which have been morphologically derived from the verbs of body posture mentioned above:

In general, gean go does not combine with the infinitive of verbs other than the ones mentioned above: the following are ungrammatical:

Standard Frisian differs from Standard Dutch with respect to selectional restrictions on bare infinitives in the complements of the locational inchoative copula. So the word by word translation equivalents of the two sentences in (10) are grammatical in Dutch. The sentences above can be expressed in grammatical Frisian by choosing a different construction. So the advent of rain can be described by a specific idiom or by choosing a modal auxiliary:

The inchoative auxiliary begjinne begin can also be used: