In all other romance languages, to go + infinitive means that the action will happen in a near future, which makes sense intuitively, because metaphorically, we move toward an event which has not happened, thus is in the future.
In Catalan, though, the passat perifràstic uses anar + infinitiu to express a past event which is now over.
What could make the language reverse the original meaning of the construction?
Unfortunately, I don't remember the source, but I believe I once read the Catalan "go-perfect" may come from the way in which one thing is made to follow another when you tell a story. It "goes on" from one thing to the next. Being a German, it also reminds me a lot of an idiomatic way of highlighting someone's next action, by saying: "und er geht her und..." (and he goes there and...), which does not imply literal going (movement) any more (it's rather something like resolution perhaps). This German construction is also used in the (morphological) present tense, understood as an "historic present", when you tell a story.
