Expressions of futurity in contemporary English: a Construction Grammar perspective

Abstract

This article describes and analyses five different ways of expressing futurity in English (shall/will, be going to, be to, the simple present and the present progressive) in a Construction Grammar framework. It suggests that the different expressions can be captured as an onomasiologically motivated family of constructions in which the single constructions are differentiated by complex co- and contextual configurations. The latter can be elegantly captured in a Construction Grammar framework since constructions by definition can include pragmatic features. Also, this article claims that constructions may be equipped with an additional ‘context slot’, in which co- and contextual information can be stored. In a final section, this article turns to the issue of tense as a grammatical phenomenon and its genesis in grammaticalisation processes. It is suggested that a Construction Grammar account can make the age-old debate about a future tense in English redundant. Instead, it complements studies in grammaticalisation and opens up some interesting perspectives on parallel developments in the onto- and phylogenesis of constructions.

The future in reports

“…finite verb forms, with the standard markers of futurity in English (Bergs 2010): will future, present progressive, simple present, to be to, to be going to, or other modal verbs; b. noun clauses or noun phrases, typically introduced by verbs or nouns with semantic elements of futurity such as 'planning' and 'commitment' (which is scheduled to reach the market in the next few years; our comprehensive and integrated sustainability strategy for the next decade).…”

“…An investigation of going to forms shows that there are in all 15 occurrences of the pattern in the corpus and that these are found in only 6 of the 30 reports (Heineken 2010;HP 2007 andGlaxo 2008;Epson 2007 and. Going to -usually "associated with intentionality and (objective) prediction deriving from present circumstances" (Bergs 2010: 224) -reflects the intentional context in 10 out of the 15 occurrences (we are going to set up a compliance monitoring process) and limits the 'objective prediction' meaning to 5 occurrences (it is clear that manufacturers are going to have to rethink their production systems).…”

7. Social and constructional diffusion: Relative clauses in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Dutch

“…Building on Bergs (2010), who proposes an onomasisological analysis of English future constructions as opposed to the predominantly semasiological approach in constructionist work, we consider the two constructions as members of a family of constructions expressing the meaning COMMAND. Bergs (2010) suggests that grouping (sub)constructions from an onomasiological perspective may be visualized by listing a number of semantically related constructions within a box.…”

Modal meaning in Construction Grammar

“…This observation led to the organization of a workshop on modal meaning in Construction Grammar at ISLE 3, the third conference of the International Society for the Linguistics of English, held in Zürich in 2014. While attempts to analyse modal (and/or future) auxiliaries from this theoretical perspective are relatively scare, they are definitely not non-existent, and we could mention at least work by Bergs (2010), Boogaart (2009), Cappelle and Depraetere (2013), Cappelle and De Sutter (2010), Diewald (2006), Diewald andSmirnova (2011a, 2011b), Goldberg and Van der Auwera (2012), Hilpert (2008Hilpert ( , 2013aHilpert ( , 2013b, Mortelmans (2000) and Wärnsby (2002). Boogaart and Fortuin (2016) provides a succinct general treatment of the subject and an overview of the literature.…”