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A relevance-theoretic account of be going to

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 1997

STEVE NICOLLE
Affiliation:
Author's address: Communication Studies Set, Middlesex University, Trent Park, Bramley Road, London N14 4XS, U.K. E-mail: s.nicolle@mdx.ac.uk Communication Studies, Middlesex University

Abstract

This paper provides a relevance theoretic account of the semantics of the be going to construction in English, based on Klinge's (1993) model for the semantics of the modal auxiliaries, and in particular of will. The semantics of both forms will be accounted for in terms of the relation between linguistic representations of situations and cognitive domains. Finally the pragmatics of utterances of sentences containing will and be going to will be discussed.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
1997 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

I am grateful to Alex Klinge, David Adger and two anonymous JL referees for comments on earlier versions of this paper, and to Liliane Haegeman for comments on section 3.