Bratich z Amassing the Multitude 333 Source: International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 12(3) (2007): 297–333. 28 Lexical-grammatical Patterns in Spoken English: The Case of the Progressive with Future Time Reference Nadja Nesselhauf and Ute Römer 1. Introduction W hile the lexical-grammatical patterns of the future time expressions will, shall and going to have received a considerable amount of atten- tion, particularly in recent years (cf. for example Berglund (1997, 2000); Szmrecsanyi (2003); Krogvig and Johansson (1984); Fries (1925)), the patterns of the progressive with future time reference (as in He’s arriving tomorrow) have hardly been empirically investigated to date. 1 Statements on the use of the progressive with future time reference are therefore frequently based on unsystematic observation and also often rather vague (see Section 3). In this paper, we would like to contribute to filling this gap by providing a comprehensive corpus-driven analysis of lexical-grammatical patterns of the progressive with future time reference in spoken British English. Our analysis is based on the spoken part of the British National Corpus (referred to as ‘BNC_spoken’ in what follows), which contains 10 million words of recorded and transcribed informal and formal conversations, radio- and