"Be Going To" as a Case of High Aspect

TP ---------T PROGP � PROG be -ing woll P � wall go VP � The new idea here is that PROG does not take the bare VP as its argument, as we are used to seeing, but rather the larger wall P. I will call aspect in this kind of position "high aspect" since it is higher than aspect is normally, when it combines semantically with the VP. This requires nothing new in the way of denotations as long as wall P has the same type as VP. We will have lots more to say about the meaning of the structure in ( 1 ) , by way of arguing that bgt in fact has that meaning. But intuitively for now, the partially-decomposed meaning of the part of the structure, with a present tense in T and using a very basic meaning for the progressive operator, would be something like that given in (2c) below. "NOW" is the time of utterance.