The Conventional Implicature Of Be Going To Construction: A Grammaticalisational Analysis

As a common expression of futurity, the be going to construction has attracted a lot of attention from linguists, who try to interpret this phenomenon mainly from three different perspectives: the pedagogical grammar approach, the semantic approach and the relevance-based pragmatic approach, each of which has its own significance as well as limitations. Their debates focus on the conventional meaning of this construction, which results from the border wars between semantics and pragmatics. This paper is intended to point out that either approach could not give an adequate explanation and description to the construction.The paper introduces a new perspective to the interface problem originating from the conventionality of the linguistic form, that is, the grammaticalisational approach. It explores the grammaticalisaition process of the be going to construction along the continuum of English development and different aspects of conventional implicature of this construction. It is found from the study that during the process of grammaticalisation, the semantic content is gradually weakened, but not completely lost, and the pragmatic meaning is thus strengthened and enlarged. It concludes that both semantic and pragmatic changes contribute to the current meaning and usage of a certain linguistic expression. Semantic and pragmatic accounts of meaning should not be clearly separated. Different aspects of the conventional implicature of this construction should just be taken as the pragmatic adaptation of grammaticalisation.