ICOME6 Abstract

Meiko Metsumoto
Email: m-meiko at eva dot hi-ho dot ne dot jp

The development of be going to into a fixed semi-auxiliary of the future

Denison (1993: 393), observing that “BE going to, the progressive of GO as a semi-auxiliary of the future, receives a lot of attention in the handbooks,” explains that the construction “ will not be considered further here’ in his study. Despite the attention be going to+infinitive has received, however, I identified only four articles addressing the development of the construction in the history of English: A. Danchev et al. (1965), Aveline Pérez (1990), Andrei Danchev & Merja kytö (1994), and Paloma N. Pertejo (1999). Danchev et al. cite the following instances: 1. We’re going to go to Europe next spring if things go right, and 2. No, we ain’t going to go without the dresses. Danchev et al. maintain that, among several arguments they propose the second point in favour its [be going to] being classed as an auxiliary is its universality. i.e. the construction of going to+inf. may be used with all kinds of verbs’. This second point agrees with Kuteva’s (2004[2001]: 20) argument that “the fact that it is possible to say ‘He is going to come’, where the lexical semantics of go to involves movement away from the speaker and the semantics of come involves movement towards the speaker, is considered a proof that go to has lost its lexical meaning and thereby acquired a grammatical status within the English go-future construction.” In this paper, I will explore occurrences of be going to go/come in the databases of Late Modern English, investigating the fixing of the construction be going to as a semi-auxiliary of the future, and present my research into the history of be going to while considering the ME verb gon.

References

Danchev, A., A.Pavlova, M.Nalchadjan, O.Zlatareva. 1965. “The Construction going to+inf. in Modern English”, Zeitscrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 375-386.
Danchev, Andrei & Merja Kytö.1994. “The construction be going to+infinitive in Early Modern English”, In Studies in Early Modern English, ed. by Dieter Kastovsky, Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 59-77.
Denison , Davis. 1993. English Historical Syntax. London & New York: Longman.
Kureva, Tania. 2004(2001). Auxiliation: An Enquiry into the Nature of Grammaticalization. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press.
Pertejo, Paloma N. 1999. “Be Going To+Infinitive: Origin and Development. Some Relevant Cases from the Helsinki Corpus”, Studia Neophilologica 71: 135-142.
Pérez, Aveline. 1990. “Time in motion: Grammaticalisation of the be going to construction in English” La Trobe University Working Papers in Linguistics3, 49-64.