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Be Going to Versus Will/Shall

Does Syntax Matter?

University of Freiburg, Germany

This study offers a novel account for the variation between the two major syntactic options to express futurity in English, BE GOING TO and WILL/SHALL. The focus of attention, unlike in many previous studies, is chiefly the choice that speakers of American and British English make between future markers with reference to syntactic characteristics of the surrounding text. On the basis of an empirical analysis of spoken data, this study demonstrates that future marker distributions seem to be sensitive to four factors: (1) contexts of negation, (2) contexts of subordination, (3) IF-clause environments, and (4) sentence length. More specifically, there is a positive correlation between syntactic complexity and the likelihood of the occurrence ofBEGOINGTOinstead of WILL/SHALL. The analysis proposes that an issuewith economy and online-processing constraints might be responsible for the sensitivity of future marker distributions to syntactic context.

Key Words: English future markers • syntax • corpus linguistics

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