This paper investigates the semantics of be going to, starting from a schematic definition which interprets temporal meanings in terms of referential and epistemological attributes. The analysis is framed within the model of cognitive grammar, taking deictic syntactical constructions as instances of grounding predications and differences between them as triggered by aspects of construal and profiling. On the basis of corpus material from American and British English texts, it is concluded that be going to features a paradoxical but pragmatically plausible interpretation of the future as non-given yet present, with a pending event's being signaled or announced at the time of speaking.

In this paper, we propose a unified account of the semantics of the English present progressive in the form of a semantic network, basing ourselves on the theoretical principles and analytical tools offered by the theory of Cognitive Grammar, as laid out by Langacker (1987, 1991). The core meaning of the English present progressive, we claim, is to indicateepistemic contingencyin the speaker's immediate reality. It thus contrasts with the simple present, which is associated with situations that are construed asstructurallybelonging to reality. On the basis of a study of the Santa Barbara Corpus of spoken American English, an inventory has been made of the more specific uses of the present progressive, temporal as well as modal. It is shown that each of these uses can be derived from this basic meaning of contingency in immediate reality via a set of conceptual branching principles, in interaction with elements in the context.

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