Future-Tense Constructions in Predictive and Planning Discourse in English, German, and Russian

Abstract

The subject of this research is the distribution and functioning of grammatical future-tense constructions in genres of future-oriented discourse (forecasts, political promises, plans, predictions) in English, German, and Russian. The study aims to determine how future forms are distributed across genres and languages and whether this distribution corresponds to the profiles of perceived certainty, intention, and control identified in a pilot perception survey of native speakers used here for comparison. The material comprises 300 occurrences of future constructions drawn from open institutional and media sources in the three languages: official publications of weather services and central banks, party manifestos and programmatic speeches, corporate press releases and announcements, and horoscopes, mainly from 2015–2026. The methodology combines corpus and discourse analysis: each occurrence of a future construction is coded for form (will, be going to, and the futurate present in English; werden + Infinitiv and the present tense in German; perfective and imperfective aspect in Russian) and communicative function (prediction, intention, promise, plan, hypothesis), after which frequency distributions across genre and language cells are compared and a form and function cross-tabulation is performed. Particular attention is paid to whether the predominance of particular forms in specific genres coincides with their perceived certainty and intentionality. The scientific novelty lies in projecting, for the first time, the perceptual dimension of the future onto its genre-discursive use and in studying the perception–use link contrastively. The findings show that the genre distribution of future constructions is culturally and systemically specific: English opposes the universal will to the futurate present of schedules, with be going to absent from institutional texts; German distributes futurity between the contextual present and the epistemic werden; Russian encodes the contrast between result and process through the aspectual opposition. The logic of genre distribution correlates with the perceptual profiles of the forms: a genre selects the construction whose certainty and intentionality profile matches its communicative task.