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GÜNTER RADDEN, Meaningful Grammar

plicatures: I did not miss my old teacher and the car safely stayed on
the road. Prospective tenses such as the be going to-Future are thus
clearly different in meaning from the absolute will-Future. They are,
therefore, often also distinguished terminologically as futurates. Fu-
turate forms focus on the source on which our expectation about the
future is based, in particular intention, volition, indication or arrange-
ment. English has quite a few futurate forms, some of which are listed
in Table 1.

Futurate forms Future meanings Examples
be going to intentional, indicative It’s going to rain.
be about to/on the point of imminent I am about to leave.

be on the brink/on the verge of immediate and disastrous I am on the verge of collapse.
Present Progressive arranged I am getting married.
Simple Present scheduled Doors open at 6 p.m.

Table 1: Futurate forms and their meanings.

The futurate forms listed above are far from forming a homogeneous
class. The first three types have a lexical basis, the latter two are gram-
matical forms. In the group of lexical expressions, be going to describes
an event and is in the progressive, while be about to and be on the brink
of describe a state and are in the non-progressive. Likewise, one of the
grammatical forms is in the progressive and the other one in the non-
progressive.
The diversity of prospective expressions reveals that the future
is not on a par with the present and the past. In English, the distinction
between factual reality and projected reality is crucial. Possibly, lan-
guages that lack a morphological Future Tense like English are richer
in futurate expressions. The futurate forms do not just happen to be
there but reflect people’s communicative needs. People want to be able
to inform the hearer about the source on which their expectation is
based. They have introduced these forms at some time in the past and
we can still assume that their choice of expressions was motivated.
The following section will examine one of these forms more closely:
the widely used be going to-Future.

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