Explaining the expressive effects of the be going to construction in contemporary English

The present thesis is an attempt to provide a meaning-based explanation of the uses of the be going to construction as a means of expressing the future in English. Previous work on the topic is reviewed in order to situate the problem of analysis posed by this area of usage. The explanation proposed is based on the hypothesis that each of the elements which make up the construction under study brings its potential significate to the context in order to help to produce the overall expressive effect which results from interaction of these elements with the context. Thus the use of the verb go in the progressive construction together with the preposition to followed by an infinitive produces the effect of expressing an incomplete movement, starting from a prior point of reference and moving towards a goal which is expressed by the infinitive. This hypothesis is verified through the analysis of a corpus of data coming from several different sources.