“Modal + be going to ” and “modal + be about to ”

Abstract

This paper considers the differences in frequency and behavior between “modal + be going to ” (M-BGT) constructions and “modal + be about to ” (M-BAT) constructions. A search in the British National Corpus and the Corpus of Contemporary American English reveals that be about to co-occurs with modals more frequently than be going to does, that future-oriented modals co-occur more with be going to than with be about to , and that the forms “ may/might/could + be about to ” co-occur predominantly with telic predicates. These findings are explained in terms of the degree of grammaticalization and the temporal structures of M-BGT constructions and M-BAT constructions, which inherit, respectively, the basic properties of the temporal structures of be going to and be about to .