Actually a lot of languages mark
future tense, including Latin and Classical Greek. The question comes
down in part to what we mean by tense marking. In all three languages,
tense marking is a system of morphological contrasts. They can all use
lexical markers to identify other tenses and aspects, like the Latin perfect
passive, which uses the verb esse “to be” with the past
participle. Morphologically, English doesn’t have a future tense,
and since tense is marked morphologically in English we can say that English
doesn’t have a future tense. This doesn’t mean that English
can’t express a future meaning, as Pullum demonstrates, but our various
lexical means of expressing futurity, because they are lexical, inevitably
express much more than simple future tense.
As to why English lacks a future
tense morpheme, that, I fear, takes us back to the dawn of time, or at least to
the dawn of the Germanic languages. When the Germanic dialect split off
from Indo-European and came in contact with speakers of what is generally
called “Old European,” the language or languages spoken in Europe
before the arrival of the Indo-Europeans, it radically restructured its tense
system, possibly under the influence of Old European. The result was that
the two Indo-European tense/aspect conjugations with past tense interpretation (aorist
and perfect) merged into a single past tense, with the perfect showing up as
the past singular form and the aorist as the past plural. In time, the
past plural disappeared, except in very formal registers of Scandinavian
languages. In Indo-European, perfect aspect indicated a completed action,
and aorist aspect looked at an event or process as a snapshot in time. In
the process of the change from Indo-European to Germanic, all of the other I-E
tenses, including the future, as well as most forms of other moods like
optative and subjunctive largely disappeared, remnants of the I-E optative
taking over as the Proto-Germanic subjunctive. So it was a historical
accident that we don’t have future accidence (an old word for
inflectional morphology) in English.
Herb
From: Assembly for the
Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Carol
Morrison
Sent: 2008-03-20 10:06
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Does English have a future tense?
I was taught in college that there is no future tense in
English. According to my college text, Analyzing
English Grammar, by Klammer, Schulz, & Volpe, "There
is no future tense morpheme in English, no affix that can be attached to a verb
to indicate that the action will take place in the future. Simple future time
must be expressed by other words in the sentence" (180). The following
examples are given of how to express the future:
1) Modals
I shall be
out of town next week.
Larry definitely will
be at the party.
2) Present
Tense + Adverbial Modifiers
The class ends
at
11:00.
Leave
a message when you
call.
Susan is
leaving for New York on
Thursday.
It does seem odd that there is no tense marker for the
future. I wonder if one reason is that you can't mark a
tense for something that is yet to come or hasn't happened yet: for a
time, place, and situation that is yet to be determined.
Carol
"STAHLKE, HERBERT F" <[log in to unmask]> wrote: