I’m thrilled to be allowed to deliver a talk at the conference Meaning in Flux: Connecting Development, Variation, and Change at Yale University in October of 2017. My talk will be on the development of prospective adverbial clauses. The main aim is to show that prospective adverbial clauses usually develop out of purpose adverbial clauses. I’ll illustrate that this development is a cross-linguistic diachronic pattern attested in many languages, and elaborate on the question of what semantic and pragmatic factors pave the way for this development.