Description:
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>This paper revisits a construction that is rare in historical data, namely the combination of <jats:italic>being</jats:italic> with an infinitive, as in <jats:italic>They being to arrive early that afternoon, all necessary preparations had been made</jats:italic>. In early and late Modern English, the <jats:sc><jats:italic>be </jats:italic><jats:italic>to</jats:italic></jats:sc> construction had a fuller paradigm than it does in Present Day English, where it is (almost) exclusively used in tensed forms. The focus in this paper is on part of the paradigm of the <jats:sc><jats:italic>be </jats:italic><jats:italic>to</jats:italic></jats:sc> construction, i.e., instances with a present participle form of <jats:italic>be</jats:italic>. Relevant neighbouring constructions are <jats:italic>being Ving</jats:italic> and <jats:italic>having to V</jats:italic>, but the construction also needs to be discussed against the background of developments in the system of auxiliaries and future time expressions. On the basis of evidence from historical text databases and corpora, this paper provides the first detailed description of the syntactic contexts, functions and distribution of the <jats:italic>being to V</jats:italic> construction. In a next step, corpus data are used to discuss possible reasons (i.e., system dependency, paradigmatic attrition, competition and distributional fragmentation) for its apparent demise. The study thus contributes to the still somewhat underexplored area of syntactic loss.</jats:p>