V-collocates with will and be going to: A Corpus-based Analysis

V-collocates with will and be going to: A Corpus-based Analysis Jarry Chia-Wei Chuang Department of English National Chengchi University Taipei, Taiwan cwchuang.academia@gmail.com ORCID: 0000-0002-3029-4463 Abstract A corpus-based study is conducted to investigate verbs collocating with present-tensed will and be going to. Data from Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) are addressed, especially for lexical verb-collocates (V- collocates). Data-driven results show that lexical V-collocates of will and be going to are sensitive to semantic and pragmatic functions. MI scores manifest that verbs with deficient meanings but higher functionality can be commonly applied to will contexts. V-collocates in will contexts have a wider acceptance of register, despite a potential stylistic preference to formal use; in contrast, V- collocates in be going to reveal its lower formality but higher frequency in informal spoken context. Additionally, semantic expansion with metaphorical and hilarious use is interestingly found in informal be going to contexts, especially on words involved with serious legal or security issues. In general, meaning shifts within will and be going to are greatly influenced by and pragmatically derived from context, which is coordinated with the monosemous account by Nicolle (1998a). The present findings offer new information about the distinction of English future event markers. Keywords: verb collocates (V-collocates), will, be going to, corpus-based, COCA 1 Introduction 1.1 Overview As primary English future event expressions, will and be going to have been long explored for their intricacies in syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic aspects (Berglund, 1997, 2005; Haegeman, 1989; Nicolle, 1998a; Szmrecsanyi, 2003). Researchers have demonstrated their efforts in the distinction with different methods and from theoretical aspects, while the relation between will and be going to in actual use remains complicated. 1.2 Research Difficulties The difficulties in distinguishing them can be derived from (1) their intimate associations with tense, aspect, and mood/modality (TAM), (2) their sensitivity to syntactic and semantic conditions, and (3) disambiguation from their semantics or pragmatics. As Haegeman (1989) noted: “to analyze future markers in English, we address not only tense and aspectual auxiliaries but also the relation between surface representations of tense and truth conditions.” In addition, by examining syntactic environments, Szmrecsanyi (2003) further indicates that English future event markers are sensitive to negation, subordinate contexts, IF-clause, and even sentence length. As for their disambiguation, a monosemous account was proposed by Nicolle (1998a), in which the varieties of will and be going to interpretations and their function to express future events are pragmatically derived. Multiple factors have been widely discussed, suggesting that follow-up studies should better consider those intervenient elements at different linguistic levels. 1.3 Research Gap Previous discussions mainly focused on the complementizer layer and inflectional layer (CP & IP), while attention was seldom paid to the lexical layer (vP & VP). As the meaning core of subject predicates, sentential expressions, and utterances, lexical verbs (VLEX) (with lower functionality but rich semantic knowledge), in comparison with will and be going to, should provide vital information. Verbs collocating with will and be going to are thus believed to play a …

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