The rise of be going to: Evidence from beyond the living speech community
In mainstream spoken North American English, the future markers be going to and will are reported to occur at near equal frequencies. Insights from apparent-time and historical corpus studies suggest the past 150 years as a critical period in the formation of the current state of future temporal reference (e.g. Krug 2000, Denis & Tagliamonte 2018), but this observation remains unexplored with spoken data with sufficient historical depth. This paper thus addresses this gap with the Victoria English Archive (D’Arcy 2017), a spoken corpus covering the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Preliminary results show that be going to, while largely leaving intact linguistic constraints (e.g. sentence type, clause type), undergoes a rapid burst of frequency expansion from around 20% (pre-1900) to roughly 50% (post-1950). In addition, female speakers lead in adopting the incoming variant; however, as no statistically significant gender difference obtains, evidence for gender difference appears tenuous.
