Information about Fix in English Language
By metaphorical extension, we might understand the clouds to have intention. Metaphorical extension is important because it is the means by which a given construction breaks from contextual constraints and comes to appear in a wider variety of contexts (Hopper & Traugott, 2003:104). Replica Jaeger LeCoultre When used with inanimate subjects however, the interpretation of intention for be fixing to is no longer tenable and its meaning becomes centered in prediction.
Despite the fact that only one of these 14 earliest tokens of be fixing to occurs with an inanimate subject, modern use of the construction shows few if any constraints against such subjects, and utterances like ‘That chair’s fixin’ to break’ or ‘My head’s fixin’ to split open’ are ubiquitous. The historical relationship to the ‘decide’ meaning, qua extension of a non-volitional subject, is evident in the fact that the meaning of these utterances is not a strong prediction of a future event or state, but concerns the confluence of conditions that has the potential of leading to some future event situation.
The potentiality of futurity infixing to is seen most clearly when we compare it to other types of futurity in English, such as going to in which case we find that they are not coterminous, the difference having to do with their lexical sources. The difference between am fixing to leave and am going to leave is that going to makes a stronger commitment to the intent of leaving, while fixing to retains the meaning of ‘coming to a decision about leaving’.
In a similar way, if we compare non-animate subjects with going to and fixing to It’s fixing to break. It’s going to break, going to makes a greater prediction about the future event, whereas facing to does not allow for a firmly committed position about what will happen since the confounding factors that might bring about such an event have not yet come together. In other words, going to predicts the future event itself, while fixing to reports on an animate subject’s formation of the decision to do such and such or, in the case of an inanimate subject, on the speaker’s/writer’s judgment that conditions are favorable for such and such a prediction to come true, although either use affixing to is said with the realization that the future event may not come about.
However, very much like going to, it is not accidental that the grammatical constructions that evolved into a future marker in both cases involve a lexeme within a progressive construction along with an allative marker to. The importance of imperfectivity and specifically progressivity in the development of certain futures has been stressed many times (Bybee & Pagliuca, 1987; Bybee et al., 1991, 1994; Hopper & Traugott, 2003). Imperfective meanings, such as the progressive, are temporally unbounded (Comrie, 1976) and thus report on an activity in medias res, while the allative marker to expresses movement towards a goal.
In the case of going to, the early lexical based meanings have a subject moving physically along a path toward some goal, which gives rise to the intention prediction future meanings of that construction. In the case of early fixing to, the subject is moving along not a physical path but a mental one, i.e. making a decision about a future action, thus also setting up an intention prediction interpretation as discussed above. If one compares the sentences in (2) and (3), repeated here as (5) and (6) for convenience, we see that the difference does not involve the meaning of fix, but has to do with the grammatical constructions that each instance affix occurs in.
5. He fix’d to come with some eclat to Town.
6. I thought you knew they were fixing to run away and get married.’I heard father say
In the case of (5), fix is past and thus reports on the subject’s already have come to the decision ‘to come to town’. In (6), however, fix is in the progressive with the meaning of being in the process of making the decision ‘to run away’. It is the use affix in the progressive that supports its grammaticization into a type of future since the event is still to happen, that is, allows for an inference about a volitional subject’s intention or a prediction about what might happen with a non-volitional subject.
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