Going-to future

The going-to future is a grammatical construction used in English to refer to various types of future occurrences. It is made using appropriate forms of the expression to be going to. It is an alternative to other ways of referring to the future in English, such as the future construction formed with will (or shall) – in some contexts the different constructions are interchangeable, while in others they carry somewhat different implications.

Constructions analogous to the English going-to future are found in some other languages, including French and Spanish.

The going-to future originated by the extension of the spatial sense of the verb go to a temporal sense (a common change, the same phenomenon can be seen in the preposition before). The original construction involved physical movement with an intention, such as "I am going [outside] to harvest the crop." The location later became unnecessary, and the expression was reinterpreted to represent a near future.

The colloquial form gonna and the other variations of it as mentioned in the following section result from a relaxed pronunciation of going to. They can provide a distinction between the spatial and temporal senses of the expression: "I'm gonna swim" clearly carries the temporal meaning of futurity, as opposed to the spatial meaning of "I'm going [in order] to swim".

The going-to idiom, used to express futurity is a semi-modal verb that consists of a form of the copula verb be, the word going followed by the word "to", for instance is going to. Like other modals, it is followed by the base infinitive of the main verb (compare with "ought to".) (An alternative description is that it uses the verb go in the progressive aspect, most commonly in present progressive form, serving as an auxiliary verb and having the to-infinitive phrase as its complement. However this description fails to take into account sentences in which the main verb is elided, such as "Yes, he's going to.") It can be put into question and negative forms according to the normal rules of English grammar.

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