WHAT HAPPENED WITH ‘BE GOING TO’ AND ‘WILL/SHALL’?

WHAT HAPPENED WITH ‘BE GOING TO’ AND ‘WILL/SHALL’?

There are some researcher who conduct the research about future marker, BE GOING TO and WILL/SHALL, as the topic of research specifically focus on the choice of American and British English speaker make between those two future markers. One of them is Benedikt Szmrecsanyi, scholar from University of Freiburg. He makes different research in analysis. The previous researcher tries to find out the choice of the usage of future marker based on the reason of semantic and pragmatic differences while Benedikt Szmrecsanyi conducts this research in more syntactic point of view. By his findings, it can be found what actually happened with BE GOING TO and WILL/ SHALL in term of their appearance in American and British English speaker.

The occurrence of BE GOING TO and WILL/SHALL in conversation surely has reasonable factors. Based on Benedikt’s research there are four factors that affect American and British English speaker use those future markers. They are 1) context of negation, 2) context of subordination, 3) IF-Clause environments, and 4) sentence length. In negation context, the use of future marker is frequently stated by won’t. Based on the data corpus which are collected by Benedikt, won’t form occurs more frequent than other form of negation such us not going to, not gonna, will not, and its cliticized form ll’ not. Thus, the negation context clearly has impact in the use of future marker.

Beside the negation context, there is other context called subordination which is related to the case of relative subclause (dependent environment) and in the case of the main clause of a subclause of time (independent environment). The result strongly suggests that the use of BE GOING TO is high in dependent contexts because the fact that BE GOING TO contains more lexical and morphological than WILL/SHALL. The variant form of BE GOING TO, GONNA, also performs highly in independent context. In contrast, the performance of WILL/SHALL is less in dependent context. Clitic form of WILL,‘ll, has high distribution in independent environment. Therefore, by those descriptions it can be seen that the choice of speaker in using future marker really depends on the syntactically complex of structure of the clauses.

The complexity of clauses impacts the speakers to choose which future marker they are going to use in conversation. So does the clause of IF pattern. Main clause and subclause of IF are possible to have future marker. Based on the result of Benedikt’s research, the distribution of the use WILL/SHALL in main clause of IF-subclause is much higher than it is in IF-subclause. In sharp contrast, BE GOING TO is highly appeared in IF-subclause with the high percentage on formal British English. Hence, it cannot be denied that IF-clause also becomes one of the factors that affect the choice of future marker.

The last factor that affects the choice of future marker is the sentence length. In this case the sum of words in the sentence become determinant of the speaker of which future marker they are going to choose. Benedikt in his research prove that sentence length, exclude the future marker in counting, has measurable correlation with the future marker that is employed in the sentences. He finds out that the longer the more likely it is for BE GOING TO to be used instead of WILL/SHALL. Therefore, the length of the sentence plays an effect in determining future marker.

This Benedikt Szmrecsanyi’s research about BE GOING TO and WILL/SHALL is very interesting. It can inspires other researcher to make the same research with non native English speakers in order to know the motivation of using variant of future marker in conversation. It is good to know the factors that affect speaker in choosing future marker, BE GOING TO and WILL/SHALL, especially for Indonesian who speak English. So, what happened with BE GOING TO and WILL/SHALL in the context of Indonesian speaker hopefully could be answered by the next research with non native English speakers that surely will propose different factors.