GOING TO V vs GOING TO BE V-ing: Two equivalent patterns?

On the basis of data collected from a large-scale corpus of English, this paper examines the lexical, syntactic and semantic co-text of use of instances of the "going to V" and "going to be V-ing" constructions, as well as their distribution across text types, and then it investigates the semantic-syntactic factors that may determine the activation of the meanings of 'intentionality' vs 'predictability'. The findings show (a) that "going to V" and "going to be V" convey the same range of meanings (intentionality, predictability and, infrequently, either); (b) that the activation of these meanings depends on the interplay of several factors (e.g. the degree of humanness and agentivity of the subject, the declarative vs interrogative function of the clause); (c) that "be going to be V-ing" is infrequent compared to \u201cbe going to V\u201d and mainly typical of oral, dialogic, spontaneous communication (this suggests it is an emerging construction, part of the larger phenomenon of the increase of the progressive in English); (d) that "be going to be V-ing" occasionally conveys the progressive meaning of on-goingness, which can be also be evoked and exploited for pragmatic purposes (i.e. the expression of lack of intention)