A Relevance Theoretic Approach to Process of Grammaticalization : be going to with Conceptual Information

Abstract

In the relevance theoretic framework, the process of grammaticalization has been defined as the steps of encoding procedural information (weak grammaticalization) and of removing conceptual information (strong grammaticalization). This paper proposes that there should be an intermediate stage between fully lexical and fully grammatical expressions, because the points of encoding procedural information on one item and those of removing conceptual information from it are not always the same. Be going to provides an example of the grammaticalized items encoding not only procedural information (tense marking) but conceptual information(physical or mental processes). In order to show that it cannot be extracted as an operator from the meaning of a sentence, I define an operator as an item which has no conceptual information and argue that this approach solves Haegeman's problem(1989) on the synonymy of be going to and will.