A relevance-theoretic account of be going to

Abstract

This paper provides a relevance theoretic account of the semantics of the be going to construction in English, based on Klinge's (1993) model for the semantics of the modal auxiliaries, and in particular of will. The semantics of both forms will be accounted for in terms of the relation between linguistic representations of situations and cognitive domains. Finally the pragmatics of utterances of sentences containing will and be going to will be discussed.

Commitment: A parameter for the contrastive analysis of be going to and aller + inf.

“…12 Reference grammars of English claim that be going to has two different meanings: a root meaning called intention (also premeditation or decision), and an epistemic meaning where the speaker's prediction is based on elements (evidence) present in the situation. For an overview of the literature on be going to, see Nicolle (1997Nicolle ( , 1998, Brisard (2001) or Szmrecsanyi (2003). French grammars generally posit only one meaning for aller + inf.…”

Futurum i det engelske tempussystem: WILL vs. BE <em>going to</em>

“…En raekke forskere har behandlet forskellen mellem will og BE going to efterfulgt af infinitiv, bl.a. Binnick 1971og 1972, Haegeman 1989, Joos 1964, Leech 1987, Nicolle 1997, Palmer 1984, Quirk et al 1985, Scmrecsanyi 2003og Wekker 1976. De to former er taet nok i betydning til at der er et meget stort overlap i anvendelsen af dem, og til at stilistiske, kontekstuelle og regionale faktorer får mulighed for at påvirke deres distribution.…”

Be going toandwill:a monosemous account

“…As a result of these considerations, I will characterize be going to and will as exponents of procedural encoding, constraining the inferential processing of conceptual representations of situations and events (which, following Klinge, 1993 andNicolle, 1997, will be referred to as 'situation representations' or SRs). In the following sections, I will determine the procedural semantic content of be going to and will respectively, and account for apparent cases of polysemy in each expression with reference to the relevance theoretic distinctions outlined above.…”