The history of be fixing to: grammaticization, sociolinguistic distribution and emerging literary spaces

Abstract

The be fixing to structure not only has a long and fascinating history but also a highly contemporary presence in Internet communication. The rise of the futurate verbal periphrasis be fixing to + V shows an essentially textbook example of grammaticization, not so different in many ways from the development of be going to. However, there are some important differences too. While be going to has a wide distribution among speakers of Englishes in the world, having much to do with its sixteenth century development and subsequent global diffusion in the colonial period, be fixing to grammaticized in Southern US English in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a fact which resulted in a relatively small circumscribed geographical distribution in its earliest uses.