To be going to be doing: a pattern in search of a description

The be going to be Ving construction occurs only 36 times in the 1,000,000-word Great Britain component of the ICE corpus. Yet, its context of use is multifaceted. The be going to part may express intentionality (“When you go to Italy are you going to be doing art”), expectation/probability (“And these little cartilages at the back actually move the vocal folds when they 're going to be vibrating”) or something in between these two notions (“Could you just play the notes that I 'm going to be doing”). The be Ving part may encode a durative event (“You 're going to be transcribing all of this are you”; “are we going to be eating at your parents’ or here”), a repeated event (“And I said well I think Rebecca 's going to be going into her M Phil lectures”) or a punctual event (“And I was just going to be telling people what to do which was fine”). This construction does not necessaritly express the notion of ‘progressive aspect’, as it may also encode non-durative events. Corpus data reveal that it is half as frequent as the will be Ving to future, occurs only in spoken data, and is typically associated with pronominal subjects denoting human agents.