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

Abstract

This paper aims at reexamining the notion of commitment through a case study: the comparison of the periphrases be going to and aller + inf. in contemporary English and French in a variety of texts and syntactic environments. Three cases are examined: the occurrence of the two periphrases in conditional si / if-clauses, their use in narratives and their predictive use in news texts. This study is based on authentic translated data drawn from literary and journalistic texts and relies on an enunciative definition of commitment: commitment is defined as a 'direct mode of enunciation' where the speaker is the subjective origin validating or contemplating the future validation of the propositional content. The three cases under scrutiny show that be going to and aller + inf. are not strictly equivalent and I argue that the absence of equivalence can be linked to the fact that they behave differently as far as commitment is concerned.