‘Going forward’ – the development of a new phraseological expression

Many phraseological expressions in current use have origins that stretch back a long way and this can make the study of their development very challenging, principally because of the sparsity of data on their early use and development, but also because the language and its socio-cultural environment have changed to the extent where it is difficult to reconstruct. On the other hand, there are recent candidate expressions, such as to spill the tea (‘to tell a juicy bit of gossip’) with origin stories well within recent memory, but they typically seem at this stage restricted in their application and not part of what might be termed the central repertoire of expressions in the language and consequently may not yet be stable, long-term expressions. The expression going forward (‘in the future, from now on’) is on the other hand an expression that is of relatively recent (21st century) origin, while at the same time appears to have completed its development along the frequency S-curve to a stable position within British English. It is therefore a useful example for refining current understanding of how and why phraseological expressions come into use and the trajectories and stages (if any) of their development. In this presentation, I will establish why going forward is a phraseological expression (primarily due to its stability and non-compositional meaning) and then address some methodological challenges that present themselves when seeking to research the development of an expression in a data-led manner. These include the sparsity of oral data, and reliability questions around less traditional corpora. Milestones of development in going forward are then compared to what might be expected based on previous research (e.g. Villers 2018) to yield additional insight. Finally I consider the extent to which findings might apply to other expressions.