Elamur Research⌕
☰
home / papers / 2022 / High aspect in the English <em>be going to</em> construction: Syntactic evidence

High aspect in the English <em>be going to</em> construction: Syntactic evidence

Paper · 2022 · Daniel Duncan

Summary

The paper asks where future be going to sits in the English clause. Two analyses compete. In the high aspect account (Copley 2001; 2009), going to/gonna is a modal in ModP, and be fills a functional head above it. In the little v account (Klecha et al. 2008), the future form keeps nearly the same structure as main-verb progressive motion go.

Duncan notes the accounts make different predictions. Only the high account forbids a modal or perfect have before future be going to. He ran two online experiments:

  • a grammaticality judgement task on sentences with be gonna;
  • a task where participants chose a future or a motion reading for sentences with be going to.

Speakers rejected be gonna after modals or the perfect. In that same position, be going to drifted toward the motion reading. Both results favour the high aspect account.

This matters for two reasons. The finding backs syntactic theories in which grammaticalizing words climb the clausal spine. It also shows that "semi-auxiliaries" like be about to do not form one uniform class.

Key points

  • The two hypotheses are high aspect (Copley 2001; 2009) and little v (Klecha et al. 2008; Cournane 2015).
  • The diagnostic is whether future be going to can follow a modal or perfect have (e.g., should be gonna, has been gonna).
  • Experiment 1 asked for acceptability of contracted be gonna. Sentences with a modal or perfect before it were judged ungrammatical.
  • Experiment 2 asked for future vs. motion interpretation of full be going to. A preceding modal or perfect raised motion readings.
  • Be going to behaves differently from be about to, contra the semi-auxiliary class of Quirk et al. (1985).
  • Rare online hits of modal/perfect be gonna exist, which may point to covert heterogeneity across speakers.
  • Imma can be treated as ordinary contraction onto a modal, with no extra grammaticalization needed.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Compare two theories by finding one concrete configuration where only one of them predicts a gap, then test that gap directly; this turns a vague debate into a yes/no check.
  • I2. A preceding modal or perfect auxiliary pushes be going to away from a future meaning toward literal motion, so the auxiliary chain acts as a disambiguating cue.
  • I3. Probe the same construction in two forms: the contracted form, which only allows the future, for acceptability, and the full form, which is ambiguous, for interpretation.
  • I4. Surface-similar be X to sequences should not be lumped into one auxiliary class, since their syntax differs.
  • I5. Reduced forms like imma can be explained as stacked contraction, much like I'd've, rather than as a new word.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (learn): Design evaluation probes where rival parser or frame analyses diverge, and use them as targeted negative controls instead of relying only on aggregate scores.
  • I2 (frames): When building frames, map will be going to X or has been going to X to a motion-plus-purpose frame, and reserve the future frame for bare be going to.
  • I3 (answer): Test readers on gonna vs going to variants of the same story sentence to check that tense and event-order answers stay consistent.
  • I4 (tree): Keep separate lexical entries and attachment rules for be going to and be about to rather than one generic semi-auxiliary pattern in UD conversion.
  • I5 (tokens): Have the tokenizer expand imma and gonna into their underlying parts (I + am + going to) so downstream modal and tense handling stays uniform.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓Newcastle UniversityNewcastle upon Tyne · United Kingdom19 works · 746 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 17,450 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 17,296 worksPsychology · 1,649 worksDevelopmental and Educational Psychology · 523 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 2,379 works

Cite

Cite as Daniel Duncan. 2022. High aspect in the English <em>be going to</em> construction: Syntactic evidence. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.16995/glossa.5850

@article{duncan2022high,
  title = {{High aspect in the English <em>be going to</em> construction: Syntactic evidence}},
  author = {Daniel Duncan},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2022},
  doi = {10.16995/glossa.5850},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.5850}
}

References

50 references, 2 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. Abusch, Dorit. 1985. On verbs and time. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts dissertation. ↗
  2. Adger, David. 2003. Core syntax: A Minimalist approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press. find
  3. Bates, Douglas & Mächler, Martin & Bolker, Ben & Walker, Steve. 2015. Fitting linear mixed-effects models using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software 67(1). 1–48. DOI: https://doi.org/10.18637/ jss.v067.i01 ↗
  4. Biggs, Alison & Tamminga, Meredith. 2016. Covert heterogeneity in the done my homework construction. Paper presented at New Ways of Analyzing Variation 45, Vancouver, Canada. find
  5. Bjorkman, Bronwyn. 2011. BE-ing default: The morphosyntax of auxiliaries. Cambridge, MA: MIT dissertation. find
  6. Bowman, Samuel R. & Angeli, Gabor & Potts, Christopher & Manning, Christopher D. 2015. A large annotated corpus for learning natural language inference. Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). DOI: https://doi.org/10.18653/ v1/D15-1075 ↗
  7. Brisard, Frank. 2001. Be going to: An exercise in grounding. Journal of Linguistics 37. 251–285. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022226701008866 ↗
  8. Broadbent, Judith M. & Sifaki, Evi. 2013. To-contract or not to-contract? That is the question. English Language and Linguistics 17(3). 513–535. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1360674313000142 ↗
  9. Cinque, Guglielmo. 1999. Adverbs and functional heads: A cross-linguistic perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ↗
  10. Copley, Bridget. 2001. Be going to as a case of high aspect. In Hastings, Rachel & Jackson, Brendan & Zvolenszky, Zsofia (eds.), SALT XI, 95–113. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3765/salt.v11i0.2841 ↗
  11. Copley, Bridget. 2009. The semantics of the future. New York: Routledge. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203880258 ↗
  12. Cournane, Ailís. 2015. Modal development: Input-divergent L1 acquisition in the direction of diachronic reanalysis. Toronto: University of Toronto dissertation. find
  13. Danchev, Andrei & Kytö, Merja. 1994. The construction be going to + infinitive in Early Modern English. In Kastovsky, Dieter (ed.), Studies in Early Modern English, 59–78. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. ↗
  14. Denis, Derek & Tagliamonte, Sali A.. 2017. The changing FUTURE: competition, specialization and reorganization in the contemporary English future temporal reference system. English Language and Linguistics 22(3). 403–430. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1360674316000551 ↗
  15. Eckardt, Regine. 2006. Meaning change in grammaticalization: An enquiry into semantic reanalysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof: oso/9780199262601.001.0001 ↗
  16. Goodall, Grant. 2006. Contraction. In Everaert, Martin & van Riensdijk, Henk (eds.), The Blackwell companion to syntax, Volume I, 688–703. London: Blackwell. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470996591.ch17 ↗
  17. Green, Lisa. 1998. Aspect and predicate phrases in African American Vernacular English. In Mufwene, Salikoko & Rickford, John R. & Baugh, John & Bailey, Guy (eds.), African American English: Structure, history and use, 37–68. New York: Routledge. find
  18. Green, Lisa. 2002. African American English: A linguistic introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511800306 ↗
  19. Hopp, Holger. 2016. The timing of lexical and syntactic processes in second language sentence comprehension. Applied Psycholinguistics 37. 1253–1280. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/ S0142716415000569 ↗
  20. Hopper, Paul J. & Traugott, Elizabeth C. 1993. Grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. find
  21. Jaeggli, Osvaldo A. & Hyams, Nina M. 1993. On the independence and interdependence of syntactic and morphological properties: English aspectual come and go. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 11. 313–346. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00992916 ↗
  22. Klecha, Peter. 2014. Diagnosing modality in predicative expressions. Journal of Semantics 31. 443–455. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/fft011 ↗
  23. Klecha, Peter & Jalbert, Joseph & Munn, Alan & Schmitt, Cristina. 2008. Explaining why gonna precedes will in acquisition. Supplement to the Proceedings of the 32nd Boston University Conference on Language Development. find
  24. Krug, Manfred G. 2000. Emerging English modals: A corpus-based study of grammaticalization. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110820980 ↗
  25. Lorenz, David. 2013. On-going change in English modality: Emancipation through frequency. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 43(169). 33–48. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/ BF03379871 ↗
  26. MacKenzie, Laurel. 2012. Locating variation above the phonology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania dissertation. https://repository.upenn.edu/dissertations/AAI3542828. Mr. ↗
  27. Verb. 2007. Might be going to + V. Mr. Verb. http://mr-verb.blogspot.com/2007/07/might-be-going-to-v.html. Accessed 17 June, 2021. ↗
  28. Myers, Jay L. 2014. Fixin’ to: The emergence of an American quasi-modal. American Speech 89(1). 42–73. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-2726395 ↗
  29. Nicolle, Steve. 1998. Be going to and will: a monosemous account. English Language and Linguistics 2(2). 223–243. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1360674300000861 ↗
  30. Nie, Yining. 2015. Tense and modality in French verbal morphology. In Vīnerte, Santa (ed.), Proceedings of the 2015 Annual Conference of the Canadian Linguistics Association. find
  31. Palan, Stefan & Schitter, Christian. 2018. Prolific.ac—A subject pool for online experiments. Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance 17. 22–27. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j. jbef.2017.12.004 ↗
  32. Peer, Eyal & Brandimarte, Laura & Samat, Sonam & Acquisti, Alessandro. 2017. Beyond the Turk: Alternative platforms for crowdsourcing behavioral research. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 70. 153–163. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2594183 ↗
  33. Poplack, Shana & Tagliamonte, Sali. 2000. The grammaticization of going to in (African American) English. Language Variation and Change 11. 315–342. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/ S0954394599113048 ↗
  34. Postal, Paul M. & Pullum, Geoffrey K. 1982. The contraction debate. Linguistic Inquiry 13(1). 122–138. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4178264. ↗
  35. Pullum, Geoffrey K. 1997. The morpholexical nature of English to-contraction. Language 73(1). 79–102. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/416594 ↗
  36. Quirk, Randolph & Greenbaum, Sidney & Leech, Geoffrey & Svartvik, Jan. 1985. A comprehensive grammar of the English language. London: Longman. find
  37. R Core Team. 2020. R: A language and environment for statistical computing. Version 4.0.3. R Foundation for Statistical Computing Vienna, Austria. http://www.R-project.org/. ↗
  38. Roberts, Ian. 1985. Agreement parameters and the development of English modal auxiliaries. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 3. 21–58. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4047494. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00205413 ↗
  39. Roberts, Ian. 1997. Restructuring, head movement, and locality. Linguistic Inquiry 28(3). 423– 460. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4178986. ↗
  40. Roberts, Ian & Roussou, Anna. 2003. Syntactic change: A Minimalist approach to grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511486326 ↗
  41. Sailor, Craig & Thoms, Gary. 2019. Exhortative clauses in Scots. Paper presented at the LSA Annual Meeting, New York, NY. find
  42. Sprouse, Jon & Schütze, Carson T. & Almeida, Diego. 2013. A comparison of informal and formal acceptability judgments using a random sample from Linguistic Inquiry 2001—2010. Lingua 134. 219–248. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2013.07.002 ↗
  43. Staub, Peter & Zentz, Jason. 2017. Fixin’ to. Yale Grammatical Diversity Project: English in North America. http://ygdp.yale.edu/phenomena/fixin-to. Accessed on 17 June, 2021. Updated by Katie Martin (2018). ↗
  44. Tagliamonte, Sali A. & Durham, Mercedes & Smith, Jennifer. 2014. Grammaticalization at an early stage: future be going to in conservative British dialects. English Language and Linguistics 18(1). 75–108. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1360674313000282 ↗
  45. Traugott, Elizabeth C. & Dasher, Richard B. 2001. Regularity in semantic change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511486500 ↗
  46. van Gelderen, Elly. 2003. Asp(ect) in English modal complements. Studia Linguistica 57(1). 27–43. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9582.00096 ↗
  47. van Gelderen, Elly. 2004. Grammaticalization as economy. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/la.71 ↗
  48. Wu, Junhui & He, Qingshun & Feng, Guangwu. 2016. Rethinking the grammaticalization of future be going to: A corpus-based approach. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics 23(4). 317–341. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/09296174.2016.1226427 ↗
  49. Wurmbrand, Susi. 2003. Infinitives: Restructuring and clause structure. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110908329 ↗
  50. Zehr, Jeremy & Schwarz, Florian. 2018. PennController for Internet Based Experiments (IBEX). DOI: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/MD832 ↗

Updated

↑ back to top

This page in Markdown → https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/duncan-2022-high-aspect-english-em-be/