A relevance-theoretic account of ‘be going to’

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.