Far from being simply will, a survey of English grammar textbooks revealed that a multitude of expressions exists in the English language to express the future time. These expressions include, but are not limited to, will, be going to, the simple present tense, modals, the future perfect tense, and the present progressive tense. With so many choices and with a lack of direct relationship between tense and time, a language learner may certainly have difficulties in choosing which expression to use when attempting to produce a future utterance. A corpus-based approach to analyzing real language has been demonstrated to be quite useful for the field of TESOL (Biber, Conrad, & Reppen, 1996; Biber & Conrad, 2001; Biber & Reppen, 2002) and numerous studies on the frequency of lexical and grammatical items of language have revealed salient features that otherwise would have remained unknown. Adding to this body of knowledge, the current study was an analysis of future expressions in spoken conversational English using the television sitcom Friends as a corpus. A careful analysis of 349,106 words from transcripts of 117 randomly selected episodes revealed that the most common expression of the future in the English language is the contracted form of be going to – gonna. The results of the study also revealed that only six future expressions emerged in this spoken conversational English from this corpus: will, be going to, the simple present tense, the present progressive tense, modals, and be about to.

The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan was released in 1963, during the Cold War. Nuclear apocalypse was a big fear at the time and the fright deeply influenced the album. Therefore, this essay argues that the record contains a poetic narrative, with the overarching theme of contemporary apocalyptic death. The poetic narrative reveals an allusion to Noah’s Ark and the story of Judas, which is not present if the songs are analyzed independently. The narrative consists of five parts: “Blowin’ in the Wind” deals with the uncertainty of the 1960s; “Masters of War” describes the arming of the younger generation to fight a nuclear war; the actual apocalyptic event is chronicled in “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”; “Talkin’ World War III Blues” narrates the post-apocalyptic event and the final part is “Corrina, Corrina”, which deals with the reproductive consequences. The material will be analyzed, and the conclusion supported, by recourse to historical contextualization and religious symbolism and allusions. The essay uses Beebee’s analysis of “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” (1991) and Roos’ work on the entire Dylan canon from a thematic perspective (1982) to support the conclusions made, but compared to previous papers on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, this essay takes the original mode of music consumption into account and studies the album as a greater whole. Through an analysis of the entire record, allusions are encoded that is not evident if each song is interpreted independently.