FTR in English: the essentials

FTR in English is a well-known variable in variationist sociolinguistics. Historically, de-andative be going to (originally with spatial meaning) as a future marker is the incoming variant. As a future marker, be going to is first attested in the fifteenth century (Danchev & Kytö, Reference Danchev, Kytö and Kastovsky1994:61) and has seen a rise in frequency of occurrence since the late seventeenth century, when its grammaticalization as future marker was complete (Mair, Reference Mair2006:96f.). Be going to originally had an intentional meaning rooted in the present state of affairs (Beheydt, Reference Beheydt, Delbecque, van der Auwera and Geeraerts2005:253; Leech, Hundt, Mair, & Smith, Reference Leech, Hundt, Mair and Smith2009:107f.) but is now considered to have a fairly neutral future meaning (Brisard, Reference Brisard, Verspoor, Lee and Sweetser1997). Meanwhile, will, derived from Old English willan, has lost its originally volitional meaning over the centuries (Aijmer, Reference Aijmer and Fisiak1985). Will initially exhibited a preference for human subjects before its use was extended to nonhuman subjects. The original meaning of both future markers might be retained in contemporary usage to some extent (Bybee, Perkins, & Pagliuca, Reference Bybee, Perkins and Pagliuca1994:5-6, 17), reflected by the effects of grammatical subject, verb type, and proximity of future time reference on variant choice (see section “Corpus study”).

Corpus linguists have demonstrated that registers differ with regard to variant rates (Berglund, Reference Berglund1997; Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad, & Finegan, Reference Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad and Finegan1999:488f.; Mair, Reference Mair, Hickey and Puppel1997; Tagliamonte, Reference Tagliamonte2016). For example, be going to is more common in spoken language than in written language, in imaginative compared to informative written texts, and also occurs frequently in reported speech (Berglund, Reference Berglund1997; see also Biber et al., Reference Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad and Finegan1999:489, 495f.). Accordingly, be going to is often said to be the more informal variant that nonetheless spread to more formal registers due to the colloquialization of the norms of written English (Mair, Reference Mair, Hickey and Puppel1997, Reference Mair2006:95; Nesselhauf, Reference Nesselhauf2010).

Regarding the language-internal conditioning of FTR choice, the variationist literature suggests that be going to is favored in interrogative sentences, in subordinate clauses and particularly in conditional if-clauses, while will is the preferred variant in the apodosis of conditional clauses (Denis & Tagliamonte, Reference Denis and Tagliamonte2018; Fehringer & Corrigan, Reference Fehringer and Corrigan2015; Tagliamonte, Durham, & Smith, Reference Tagliamonte, Durham and Smith2014; Torres Cacoullos & Walker, Reference Torres Cacoullos and Walker2009). These effects are consistent across varieties of English. Other constraints, such as sentence polarity, proximity of future time reference, constraints pertaining to the grammatical subject and lexical verb type have yielded mixed results.

Corpus study: methods

Data

All of our corpus materials cover British English (and all stimuli and participants in the experiment likewise use British English). Following Koch & Oesterreicher (Reference Koch, Oesterreicher, Lange, Weber and Wolf2012), we distinguish four broad registers at the intersection between mode of communication and formality: spoken informal, spoken formal, written informal, and written formal. For the spoken informal register, we analyze the Spoken BNC2014, which features about 11.5 million words from spontaneous conversations (n = 1251) among family members and friends (n = 672), self-recorded between 2012 and 2016 (Love, Dembry, Hardie, Brezina, & McEnery, Reference Love, Dembry, Hardie, Brezina and McEnery2017). For the spoken formal register, we draw on a sixty-million-word corpus of parliamentary proceedings from debates in the House of Commons that took place between December 2007 and March 2014, provided by the Political Mashup Project (Marx & Schuth, Reference Marx, Schuth, Calzolari, Choukri, Maegaard, Mariani, Odijk, Piperidis, Rosner and Tapias2010).Footnote ² The British English blogs component of the Corpus of Global Web-based English (GloWbE), consisting of about 148 million words (Davies, Reference Davies2013; Davies & Fuchs, Reference Davies and Fuchs2015), constitutes the written informal register. As written formal register, we chose newspaper articles published between 2016 and 2019 in the British edition of the quality newspaper The Independent, amounting to about 113.5 million words (Bušta, Herman, Jakubíček, Krek, & Novak, Reference Bušta, Herman, Jakubíček, Krek and Novak2017).

We created a dataset that contains a total of 2,600 tokens of the FTR alternation. From each corpus, a random sample of 650 FTR tokens was included, half of which are tokens of will and the other half of be going to. We opted for such a balanced sample because we are not interested in variant rates but in the probabilistic conditioning of variant choice in each register; balancing the dataset in this way does therefore not pose a threat to the statistical analysis. As to data extraction, we used simple string matching of full and contracted FTR variants, which initially resulted in an enormous database (e.g., more than 490,000 concordance lines in total for the spoken formal register alone). To keep manual coding efforts manageable, we subsequently checked a random subset of one thousand concordance lines per corpus for the variable context and included the first 650 truly variable tokens in these subsets in the dataset. With that being said, to obtain a rough estimation of the rates of occurrence of FTR variants in each register, we counted the number of FTR tokens in a small sample of one hundred hits from each corpus. Table 1 reports the rates of occurrence of FTR variants in each of the one hundred hits sample per register subject to study in this paper.

Table 1. Number of verified FTR hits and variant rates in the four corpora, according to a random sample of N = 100 hits per register

Experiment: methods

Materials

The material consisted of thirty-two authentic corpus excerpts, half of which came from the spoken informal corpus, and the other half from the written formal corpus. Per register, there were six excerpts with a choice between will and be going to covering the whole probability range (i.e., six bins) and ten excerpts serving as filler items to distract participants from the target items. Six out of these ten fillers involved a choice between the relativizers which and that, and the remaining four filler items involved a lexical choice between nouns with equivalent meaning (view versus perspective, idea versus notion, chance versus opportunity, and problem versus issue).Footnote ³  These fillers were carefully chosen in order to assess whether participants take the register context into account for their ratings. If they do, we expect that formal variants presented in the formal register receive higher ratings compared to formal variants presented in the informal register.

The experiment was designed to examine the combined effect of all predictors on the choice of the FTR variant in two registers. To this end, the probability of be going to reflecting this combined effect was calculated based on a model of the two registers included in the experiment, using the same procedure as for the corpus-based model. After backward elimination, this model included the same fixed effects as the full model. Random effects did not improve model fit and were therefore excluded. Items were randomly selected from six probability bins from the whole range, with matched probabilities per bin across the two registers. To avoid a possible priming bias (in both filler and target items), we ensured that there were no instances of will or be going to other than the target variants that the participants were asked to rate. Table 2 gives an overview of the constraint settings and the corpus-based predicted probabilities for each item.

Table 2. Overview of FTR items and their constraint settings per register and probability bin

We created two lists to counterbalance the presentation order of the variants. That is, if a particular variant was presented on the left side in Item 1 in List 1, this variant was presented on the right side in List 2. There were two versions of each list with varied order for items and register blocks. While Version A began with all items from the written formal register, Version B began with the spoken informal register. In each version of the experiment, no more than two target items or two filler items of the same type followed one another. Each participant saw only one list and version of the experiment. At the beginning of each block, we presented pictures to reinforce the register context. Participants saw a family chatting at a breakfast table or a group of friends having drinks before the spoken informal block. They saw a title page from The Independent before the written formal block. In addition, the layout of the items was aimed to mimic a real-life layout of newspaper articles or a written representation of dialogues (see Supplementary materials available at https://osf.io/n943g).

General discussion and conclusion

This study has investigated whether the probabilistic conditioning of variation between overt markers of future temporal reference (FTR) in English, will and be going to, differs across four registers of British English at the intersection between mode and formality. The answer, in a nutshell, is: Yes, it does—register differences are not “quantitatively simple” (Guy, Reference Guy2005:562, about stylistic variation).

On the empirical plane, we carried out a corpus study based on a variationist dataset covering n = 2,600 tokens that we richly annotated for nine well-known language-internal constraints on FTR variation. The logistic regression model that was fitted on this dataset probes the register-specificity of the conditioning of FTR by testing the significance of interaction effects between register and the language-internal constraints under investigation. On the basis of the corpus-based regression model, we then conducted a supplementary rating task experiment (n = 114 participants) to assess native speakers’ intuitions about the two variants in context.

Corpus analysis shows that there are indeed a great deal of differences across registers. Specifically, we found that the effects of five (out of nine) internal constraints vary as a function of register. For instance, be going to is favored in contexts of negation in newspaper articles, but not in spontaneous conversations. Distal future contexts favor will in all registers included in this study except for spoken informal conversations. Similarly, first-person subjects favor be going to in all registers other than spoken informal. In addition, will is preferred when a temporal adverbial is present only in the written registers, and stative verbs favor be going to in writing, but will in conversations. Taken together, it seems that the effects found in spoken informal conversations are generally different from those found in writing.

The supplementary rating task experiment provides converging evidence that the probabilistic conditioning of variation differs as a function of register: Participant ratings of the naturalness of FTRs in two registers (spoken informal conversations and written formal newspaper articles) were in line with the variant selection probabilities calculated via the corpus model.

In summary, corpus evidence and experimental evidence agree that the conditioning of FTR variation is sensitive to, and is a function of, the situational context, that is, register. We would like to briefly note here that this finding corresponds to related work on the dative alternation in English (Engel, Grafmiller, Rosseel, & Szmrecsanyi, Reference Szmrecsanyi and Engel2022; Engel, Grafmiller, Rosseel, Szmrecsanyi, & Van de Velde, Reference Engel, Grafmiller, Rosseel, Szmrecsanyi, Van de Velde, Seoane and Biber2021). Using a similar methodology as in the present study—combining the variationist method with corpus and experimental data—these other studies likewise report significant interference between register and the probabilistic conditioning of the dative alternation. This leads to the conclusion that the patterns reported in the present paper are unlikely to be variable- or alternation-specific.

Our findings have implications for at least two branches of linguistics concerned with variation. First, register analysts working in text-linguistic paradigms (Biber, Reference Biber1988) may want to take note that, according to our results, register differences are not all about frequencies and co-occurrence patterns of linguistic features. Rather, register also shapes the arguably deeper probabilistic conditioning of linguistic variation. This recognition opens up new avenues for research into register differences. Register emerges as an even more fundamental determinant of linguistic variation than has been traditionally assumed (see Szmrecsanyi, Reference Szmrecsanyi2019:93f.).

Second, of course, our results have implications for empirical practice and theory formation in variationist linguistics. More often than not, previous empirical variationist work has failed to obtain significant register effects, or “breakdown[s] of grammar from one register to the next” (Tagliamonte, Reference Tagliamonte2016:27f.). But then again, it is arguable whether the analysis methods of previous work in this line of research have been sophisticated enough to diagnose significant register differences. We propose that the methodology that we have used in the present paper—fitting one encompassing regression model across registers and testing interaction effects between register and the language-internal constraints under investigation—is the silver bullet to check the register-specificity of variable grammars. Needless to say, supplementary experimental evidence, for example via rating task experiments such as the one reported on here that are customary in Probabilistic Grammar research (Bresnan & Ford, Reference Bresnan and Ford2010) are an ideal way to check the robustness of findings deriving from naturalistic/observational data, whether it be corpora or sociolinguistic interviews.

On the theoretical plane, our point of departure was the theorem that “internal constraints … are normally independent of social and stylistic factors” (Labov, Reference Labov2010:265). We reasoned that register differences can be plausibly assumed to be akin to stylistic variation in this regard. As our results have demonstrated, this assumption is incorrect. Unlike stylistic variation, register differences are not quantitatively simple. Specifically, register differences do not only concern differences in the selection frequency of variants but also affect the conditioning of variation. This leads, then, to a discussion of whether we are justified in claiming that different registers are associated with different variable grammars (or probabilistic grammars, in the terminology of, for example, Szmrecsanyi, Grafmiller, Bresnan, Rosenbach, Tagliamonte, & Todd, Reference Szmrecsanyi, Grafmiller, Bresnan, Rosenbach, Tagliamonte and Todd2017:1). Inspired by previous work in comparative variation analysis (Guy, Reference Guy2015; Tagliamonte, Reference Tagliamonte, Chambers and Schilling-Estes2013), we apply three criteria for positing distinct variable grammars, in descending order of conservativeness:

1. 1. The set of constraints is different.

2. 2. The constraints are the same, but they have different effect directions.

3. 3. The set of constraints is the same and the effect directions are identical, but the effect sizes demonstrate a statistically significant difference.

Criterion 1 we do not explicitly address in the present study (but supplementary analysis suggests that the number of constraints can differ across registers; see Szmrecsanyi & Engel, Reference Szmrecsanyi and Engel2022). What we did demonstrate in this paper is that register modulates both the effect size and the effect direction of constraints in FTR variation. On this basis, we feel justified in arguing that different registers can be associated with different variable grammars.

That variable grammars are variable across registers has two implications. First, we may wonder about the primacy of the vernacular as a “representative” style or register, if, as our results suggest, it is not always possible to generalize from one register to the next (see also D'Arcy & Tagliamonte, Reference D'Arcy and Tagliamonte2015). Second, as we mentioned in the Introduction section, Guy's Grammatical Difference Hypothesis (Guy, Reference Guy2015) suggests that employing different constraints differently in different situations means that language users, to the extent that they master different registers, have at their disposal a range of different register-specific grammars.

Limitations of this study and directions for future research include the following. Due to our comparatively coarse operationalization of register, we might have failed to observe finer-grained distinctions within individual registers. Recent text-linguistic studies have shown that some registers, such as online blogs or conversations, are intrinsically hybrid (Biber & Egbert, Reference Biber and Egbert2018; Biber, Egbert, Keller, & Wizner, Reference Biber, Egbert, Keller and Wizner2021). Future research into probabilistic conditioning should thus investigate this issue. Another limitation is that we restricted attention to pairwise comparisons between informal conversations (“the vernacular”) and each of the other registers. More work is needed to understand how informal writing differs from formal writing, formal speech from formal writing, and so on. In addition, more research examining other variables beyond FTR variation is advised to obtain a fuller picture of the kind of constraints that are particularly variable across registers (see Tamminga, MacKenzie, & Embick, Reference Tamminga, MacKenzie and Embick2016). In this way, the field will be better equipped to assess the cognitive underpinnings of register variation. And finally, of course, the analysis needs to be extended to other languages. Are register differences in, say, English more or less pronounced than register differences in, say, French or Chinese? This kind of analysis will open up exciting avenues for new research agendas at the intersection of variationist sociolinguistics, register analysis and cross-linguistic typology.