‘Be going to’ and ‘will’: a monosemous account

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1998
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English Language and Linguistics, 2 (2)
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pages 223-243
Abstract: 
This paper provides an account of 'be going to' and 'will' within the framework of Relevance Theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1986, 1995). Because of the range of interpretations derived from the use of these expressions in different contexts, many previous accounts have characterized them as polysemous. This polysemy has been attributed to semantic retention, whereby both old (lexical) and new (grammaticalized) meanings are recovered in certain contexts. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate: (i) that although 'be going to' does exhibit semantic retention, in a relevance-theoretic framework this does not entail polysemy, and (ii) that interpretations of 'will' previously attributed to semantic retention are, in fact, pragmatically derived, and hence 'will' is also monosemous.
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This article can be found online at http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1360674300000861
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Published
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Entry Number: 
52379