The progressive form of the be going to future: a preliminary report

This paper considers some of the patterns of use of the going to be V-ing construction. An examination of data collected from the Bank of English reveals that this future is less frequent than other periphrastic constructions and mainly employed in spoken English. Unlike its non-progressive counterpart, it is frequently associated with verbs denoting durative events (but compatible also with punctual, iterative, telic, and habitual ones) and never preceded by modal expressions. Like the "going to V" and "will be V-ing futures", it can represent events of various types, belonging to a number of semantic fields. Like its nonprogressive counterpart, its matrix verb phrase is occasionally rendered in the colloquial be "gonna" variant, may be encoded in the present or past, and conveys the notions of 'predictability' and 'intentionality'. It is suggested that this is a structure-preserving construction, characterized by syntactic harmony, which prototypically encodes dynamic durative events.