Future constructions in English and Norwegian: A contrastive corpus study.

Abstract

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.