The future that may still be.: The spread of blir å INF in contemporary Norwegian.

Résumé En

This article investigates the semantics of the incipient future construction blir å INF in contemporary Norwegian. Traditionally considered a feature of northern dialects, the construction is now used in writing by speakers throughout the country. We take data from a corpus consisting of blogs and manually annotate uses for various semantic features which we then investigate quantitatively. We show that the construction is largely non-distinct with respect to the other future constructions. However, there does appear to be evidence that the construction is used significantly more frequently as indicative of low-certainly predictions. Yet, in this respect, the construction overlaps with uses typical of the vil INF construction. The study considers these results in terms of the diachronic spread and synchronic polysemy. First, we discuss whether blir å INF is encroaching on the semantic territory of vil INF specifically or is being used as an unmarked marker of futurity relative to the other constructions. Second, we consider the two main hypotheses concerning the diachrony of blir å INF: a development of an intentional construction, or a loan from Sámi. Our findings seem to support the second hypothesis. However, the synchronic nature of the data and their geographic distribution constitute two caveats that impede strong conclusions.