Manipulating Dependencies with Will and be Going to: A relevance-theoretic and Intensional Semantic Account

Abstract

Accounts differ as to whether will and be going to (bgt) are semantically distinct, whether they encode procedural or conceptual information, whether they are polysemous or monosemous, the differing senses in which they are used to express futurity of an event, and what (if any) conceptual content can ascribed to them. This paper will survey three relevance-theoretic accounts (Haegeman (1989), Klinge (1993) and Nicolle (1997)), as well as other accounts not motivated by Relevance Theory (RT). It will join Nicolle (1997) in asserting that will and bgt are both semantically and pragmatically distinct in the following manner: will encodes procedural information about an irrealis domain of discourse, while bgt encodes some form of conceptual information the hearer is given to accept as being realis. This paper will offer two suggestions about the conceptual information that bgt encodes, while also maintaining that bgt encodes procedural information above and beyond its conceptual meaning. This analysis combines the possible-worlds approach to the intensional semantics of modality (in which modals and bgt act as quantifiers over worlds) with a relevance-theoretic approach to selecting an interpretation of an utterance. Finally, we offer a suggested modification of the relevance-theoretic idea of comparative relevance of a phenomenon.