The development of future time expressions in Late Modern English: redistribution of forms or change in discourse?

This article provides the first comprehensive analysis of the development of the future time expressions will, ’ll, shall, be going to, progressive with future time reference, and be to in the course of the late modern period. The article focuses on possible reasons for the considerable changes that have taken place in the past few centuries. To what degree can the changes be described as certain forms having been (partially) replaced by others? To what degree have general or register-specific changes in discourse affected the use of future time expressions? These questions are investigated on the basis of the British part of ARCHER (A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers).