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.

Origin

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".

Gonna (Helme)

Gonna (Helme) is a river of Saxony-Anhalt, Germany.

See also

Coordinates: 51°27′N 11°16′E / 51.450°N 11.267°E / 51.450; 11.267

Gonna (song)

"Gonna" is a song recorded by American country music artist Blake Shelton. It was released to radio on August 3, 2015 as the fourth single from his ninth studio album, Bringing Back the Sunshine. The song was written by Luke Laird and Craig Wiseman.

Content

Co-writers Luke Laird and Craig Wiseman, who previously wrote Shelton's 2009 single "Hillbilly Bone", told Nash Country Weekly magazine that they did not have a song idea when they met during a songwriting session. Laird began beatboxing, providing Wiseman with a "structure" to which he began adding lyrics. Laird said that "We just wanted to write something that was fun for us to play", while praising Wiseman's "quirky lyrics". Thematically, the song is about a man professing his intent to start a relationship with a woman, basing the hook around the word "gonna". Nash Country Weekly described the song as a "mid-tempo with a slight reggae influence" plus "a faint vocal beatbox" and "a simple, memorable lead guitar riff that plays again before each verse".