On the so-called future-progressive construction

Abstract

This article aims to systematically explain linguistic facts concerning the will + be -ing construction (WBI construction) in terms of a general theory of tense. For this purpose, temporal structures of the WBI construction are constructed based on the tense theory of Wada (2001, 2009, 2011) by combining temporal structures of sentences containing will with temporal structures of sentences containing present-progressive forms. It is shown that the temporal structure-based analysis not only addresses problems with previous studies, but also illuminates the characteristics of the WBI construction in a unified way.