I am taking the bus tomorrow vs I am going to take [duplicate]

Question

In your interviews for an ESL teacher, you are asked a question of this sort:

What is the difference between:

a. I am taking the bus tomorrow.
b. I am going to take the bus tomorrow.

Or

a. I lived in Kerala for 2 years.
b. I used to live in Kerala for 2 years.

Surely, they mean the same thing. That's precisely what makes it difficult to explain the difference. Could anyone help me with it?

Answer 1

a) I am taking the bus tomorrow.
b) I am going to take the bus tomorrow.

If I was back teaching ESL, I would tell my students that both of these sentences, while grammatical, are not fluent English. Native speakers don't say sentences like that. We can deal with the semantic difference later.

• First, nobody ever says "I am" in two words, unless they're reading aloud. Just as I will is usually pronounced I'll /a:l/, I am is almost always contracted to I'm /a:m/, unless the am is stressed, as it is when it appears isolated at the end of the sentence, like:
  He's not enjoying this as much as I am.
• Second, nobody ever says going to; it's always pronounced gonna /'gənə/. It's a fused idiom, like have to /'hæftə/, with its own grammar and pronunciation.

As for the meaning difference, there is little, but what there is focusses on the immediacy of the imagined future event. For instance,

• Look out! That rock is gonna fall!
• ??Look out! That rock will fall!

The progressive for the future is usually a matter of personal plan, whereas gonna signals imminence, if anything. It's not surprising there isn't much difference in most contexts.

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a) I lived in Kerala for 2 years.
b) *I used to live in Kerala for 2 years

(a) is a normal grammatical sentence, but (b) is ungrammatical, because of the grammar of the idiom used to. That idiom asserts a proposition in the past tense and also presupposes its negation in the present tense. That sounds complicated, and it is.

• I used to live in Michigan.
  (I lived in Michigan is the past proposition, which can be denied;
  I don't live in Michigan is the present proposition, which can't be denied.)

If I say I used to live in Michigan and I never lived there, I'm lying. That's the assertion in the past. But if I have lived in Michigan all my life and I say that, am I lying? Certainly misleading, but by presupposition.

As for for 2 years, that won't go with used to here because the proposition being asserted is not a condition like living in Kerala, but rather an action, with a beginning and end. The only way you can use an action with used to is by considering it as a repeated action

• He used to smoke cigarettes/drink gin/pick his nose/compliment you

that is no longer repeated. But would mean that [living in Kerala for two years] was something I used to do. That, of course, doesn't work. But

• He used to go to work for 2 hours and then duck out for a drink.

is perfectly grammatical if reprehensible, because it's an activity that can be repeated -- that there's time to repeat. So the temporal phrases are fine.

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I don't know how these answers would affect an examining board. Given the terrible examples we get here of awful instructional resources, I have my doubt. But it's all true.