This paper presents the first large-scale multivariate analysis of future-time reference (FTR) variation in world Englishes. On the basis of 7,922 hand-coded tokens from eight corpora of the International Corpus of English suite, the study probes the effect of eight predictor variables on the choice between will and BE going to (BGT) as FTR markers. Statistically significant effects for all conditioning variables except polarity are found, as well as two significant interaction terms involving modality. By contrast, the predictor variety enters the model only as a main effect, but is not involved in any interactions. This is interpreted as a sign of strong unity in the system of FTR variation in English world-wide. At the theoretical level, the paper argues for a stronger focus on such tendencies towards unity among global varieties of English.

中文翻译：

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世界英语将来时参考

本文首次对世界英语中未来时间指代 (FTR) 变化进行大规模多元分析。该研究以国际英语语料库的 8 个语料库中的 7,922 个手工编码标记为基础，探讨了 8 个预测变量对will和 BE to (BGT) 作为 FTR 标记的选择的影响。发现了除极性之外的所有条件变量的统计显着效应，以及涉及模态的两个显着交互项。相比之下，预测变量品种仅作为主效应进入模型，但不参与任何交互作用。这被解释为世界范围内英语FTR变体系统的强大统一的标志。在理论层面上，本文主张更加关注全球英语变体之间的这种统一趋势。