Revisiting the grammaticalization of future be going to: A corpus-based approach

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Corpus Linguistics
• Historical Linguistics

Background:

• Quantitative corpus studies offer empirical insights into grammaticalization.
• Existing research often overlooks the specific relationship between frequency and grammaticalization.
• Critical frequency is proposed as a key metric to identify grammaticalization triggers.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the critical frequency (synchronic intensity and diachronic thickness) of the future construction 'be going to'.
• To clarify the relationship between the critical frequency and general frequency of 'be going to'.
• To confirm the frequency threshold that triggers grammaticalization.

Main Methods:

• Analysis of large corpora (EEBO, Google Books, COCA) to trace the development of 'be going to'.
• Quantitative analysis including Chi-square and linear regression tests.
• Calculation of synchronic intensity and diachronic thickness.

Main Results:

• The diachronic thickness of 'be going to' spans 110 years (1580-1690).
• The synchronic intensity of 'be going to' is 0.81 per million words.
• A strong correlation was found between the critical frequency and general frequency of 'be going to'.

Conclusions:

• The study confirms a specific frequency threshold for the grammaticalization of 'be going to'.
• It elucidates the relationship between critical and general frequencies in grammaticalization.
• Findings provide a framework for future quantitative research on language change and grammaticalization.