---
title: "High aspect in the English <em>be going to</em> construction:"
description: "The paper asks where future be going to sits in the English clause. 50 references. Two analyses compete."
authors: ["Daniel Duncan"]
year: 2022
venue: "Glossa: a journal of general linguistics"
source: "https://www.glossa-journal.org/article/id/5850/"
doi: "10.16995/glossa.5850"
licence: "CC BY 4.0"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/duncan-2022-high-aspect-english-em-be/"
---
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# High aspect in the English \<em>be going to\</em> construction: Syntactic evidence

**Authors:** Daniel Duncan · **Year:** 2022 · **Venue:** [Glossa: a journal of general linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/glossa-a-journal-of-general-linguistics/) ([Glossa a journal of general linguistics 2022](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/glossa-a-journal-of-general-linguistics/2022/)) · **Publisher:** [Ubiquity Press](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/ubiquity-press/) · **Licence:** [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.5850) · [PDF](https://www.glossa-journal.org/article/5850/galley/22506/download) · [DOI 10.16995/glossa.5850](https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.5850) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W4295395651)

**Citations:** 1 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14)

## Summary
The paper asks where future *be going to* sits in the English clause. Two analyses compete. In the high aspect account (Copley 2001; 2009), *going to*/*gonna* is a modal in ModP, and *be* fills a functional head above it. In the little v account (Klecha et al. 2008), the future form keeps nearly the same structure as main-verb progressive motion *go*.

Duncan notes the accounts make different predictions. Only the high account forbids a modal or perfect *have* before future *be going to*. He ran two online experiments:
- a grammaticality judgement task on sentences with *be gonna*;
- a task where participants chose a future or a motion reading for sentences with *be going to*.

Speakers rejected *be gonna* after modals or the perfect. In that same position, *be going to* drifted toward the motion reading. Both results favour the high aspect account.

This matters for two reasons. The finding backs syntactic theories in which grammaticalizing words climb the clausal spine. It also shows that "semi-auxiliaries" like *be about to* do not form one uniform class.

## Key points
- The two hypotheses are high aspect (Copley 2001; 2009) and little v (Klecha et al. 2008; Cournane 2015).
- The diagnostic is whether future *be going to* can follow a modal or perfect *have* (e.g., *should be gonna*, *has been gonna*).
- **Experiment 1** asked for acceptability of contracted *be gonna*. Sentences with a modal or perfect before it were judged ungrammatical.
- **Experiment 2** asked for future vs. motion interpretation of full *be going to*. A preceding modal or perfect raised motion readings.
- *Be going to* behaves differently from *be about to*, contra the semi-auxiliary class of Quirk et al. (1985).
- Rare online hits of modal/perfect *be gonna* exist, which may point to covert heterogeneity across speakers.
- *Imma* can be treated as ordinary contraction onto a modal, with no extra grammaticalization needed.

## Interesting ideas
- Compare two theories by finding one concrete configuration where only one of them predicts a gap, then test that gap directly; this turns a vague debate into a yes/no check.
- A preceding modal or perfect auxiliary pushes *be going to* away from a future meaning toward literal motion, so the auxiliary chain acts as a disambiguating cue.
- Probe the same construction in two forms: the contracted form, which only allows the future, for acceptability, and the full form, which is ambiguous, for interpretation.
- Surface-similar *be X to* sequences should not be lumped into one auxiliary class, since their syntax differs.
- Reduced forms like *imma* can be explained as stacked contraction, much like *I'd've*, rather than as a new word.

## For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

- **I1** (learn): Design evaluation probes where rival parser or frame analyses diverge, and use them as targeted negative controls instead of relying only on aggregate scores.
- **I2** (frames): When building frames, map *will be going to X* or *has been going to X* to a motion-plus-purpose frame, and reserve the future frame for bare *be going to*.
- **I3** (answer): Test readers on *gonna* vs *going to* variants of the same story sentence to check that tense and event-order answers stay consistent.
- **I4** (tree): Keep separate lexical entries and attachment rules for *be going to* and *be about to* rather than one generic semi-auxiliary pattern in UD conversion.
- **I5** (tokens): Have the tokenizer expand *imma* and *gonna* into their underlying parts (I + am + going to) so downstream modal and tense handling stays uniform.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

## Institutions

- [Newcastle University](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/newcastle-university/) — University, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom · 19 works · 746 citations

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## Cite

Cite as: Daniel Duncan. 2022. High aspect in the English \<em>be going to\</em> construction: Syntactic evidence. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@article{duncan2022high,
  title = {{High aspect in the English <em>be going to</em> construction: Syntactic evidence}},
  author = {Daniel Duncan},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2022},
  doi = {10.16995/glossa.5850},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.5850}
}
```

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*Updated 2 November 2026*