Page 144 - Costellazioni 6

GÜNTER RADDEN, Meaningful Grammar

In sentence (6c), the focus shifts from the movement part to
the intended future action. This is the sense ‘b’ of the intentional
be going to-Future, where the aspect of movement may be com-
pletely gone. This shift in focus is motivated by metonymy. In
metonymy, two concepts are closely associated so that the men-
tion of one of these concepts, the source, evokes the other con-
cept, the target, which becomes more salient. We, therefore, un-
derstand going to the library metonymically to mean ‘studying at
the library’. The metonymy is conceptual in nature because it ap-
plies to an open range of situations: going to bed means ‘go to
sleep’ and going to the bathroom, of course, means more than just
going there. The underlying conceptual metonymy can be stated
as MOVEMENT TO A GOAL STANDS FOR ACTION PERFORMED AT THE GOAL.
In sentence (6d), my intention to make a person happy in-
vites the metonymic implicature that this will also happen, prob-
ably because certain indications allow me to predict this outcome.
For example, I know that my presence always gives her a smile.
Sentence (6e), finally, no longer involves intention and is
understood in sense ‘C’, i.e. the sense of ‘prediction based on in-
dications’, or simply ‘conclusive future’, as in The party is going
to be fun because all of us will be dressed up.
The development of the ‘movement’ sense of be going to to
‘intention’ and ‘prediction’ is, in fact, consistent with a general
tendency of shifts from concrete meanings to abstract meanings.

(ii) This far we have looked at the historical developments lead-
ing to the two senses of the be going to-Future. Present-day lan-
guage users are, of course, not aware of these developments.
Most speakers are probably not even aware of the fact that there
are two senses: To them, the be going to-construction has just one
future meaning. If we want to model the native speakers’ lin-
guistic intuition, we need to search for a commonality shared by
both future meanings. We may reasonably surmise that the
shared meaning is that of a ‘causal situation implying a future
outcome’. both the intentional future and the conclusive future
can now be subsumed under this abstract characterization, as
shown in Table 2.

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