Future constructions in English and Norwegian
A contrastive corpus study
The choice between the future constructions will/shall and BE going to is among
the most well-investigated topics in English linguistics. A host of semantic, pragmatic, and syntactic factors has been suggested
to drive the alternation between these constructions. Recent research has taken a contrastive perspective and investigated whether
similar factors also apply to Norwegian, which shows a very similar alternation (skal/vil vs. kommer til
å). This paper follows up on this line of research, taking new data into account. Drawing on the Open American
National Corpus (OANC) and the Spoken BNC2014 for English on the one hand and the NoTa corpus as well as the Big Brother corpus
for Norwegian, we carve out commonalities and differences between the alternation patterns in English and Norwegian, and we argue
that in both languages, it may actually be semantic, rather than structural, aspects that play the most crucial role in language
users’ choice between competing future constructions.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Previous research
- 3.Our study
- 3.1Data and methods
- 3.2Results and discussion
- 3.2.1Conditional inference trees and random forests
- 3.2.2Collostructional analysis
- 4.Conclusion and outlook
- Acknowledgements
- Data availability
- Notes
-
References
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.