Future‐time reference in world Englishes

Abstract

This paper presents the first large‐scale multivariate analysis of future‐time reference (FTR) variation in world Englishes. On the basis of 7,922 hand‐coded tokens from eight corpora of the International Corpus of English suite, the study probes the effect of eight predictor variables on the choice between will and BE going to (BGT) as FTR markers. Statistically significant effects for all conditioning variables except polarity are found, as well as two significant interaction terms involving modality. By contrast, the predictor variety enters the model only as a main effect, but is not involved in any interactions. This is interpreted as a sign of strong unity in the system of FTR variation in English world‐wide. At the theoretical level, the paper argues for a stronger focus on such tendencies towards unity among global varieties of English.