In my (college) grammar classes,
I usually tell students that the primary distinction in English verbs is
between Real and Unreal, with present vs. past being a subdistinction of Real,
and modals marking various kinds of Unreal. Future is typically presented as a
kind of Unreal, although it can be cast as Real (via the simple present) if the
speaker is very sure about it (“I leave for Washington tomorrow”). All
of that’s an oversimplification, of course, but I warn them about that.
And a side note about the degree
to which people get invested in the tense system terminology: Years ago, I had
a colleague who, although quite intelligent and very good with
Latin, Greek, and several other languages, reacted to the idea that “will
isn’t really a future tense” with obvious anger (not disagreement –
anger). Being a linguist, I of course launched into the argument that there is
no apparent difference in the grammatical behavior of will vs. the other
modals, like might. The immediate retort was that there is a
fundamental obvious difference: will is a future tense marker and the
other modals aren’t. I was never able to break him out of that
argument loop, or to get him to see that it was a loop –but I strongly
suspected he would spot a circular argument anywhere else but in that
particular case. Maybe it’s just that the label system is so
counterintuitive that once we’ve spent an enormous amount of effort
learning it, we don’t want to threaten the investment.
Bill Spruiell
Dept. of English
Central Michigan University
From: Assembly for the
Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Carol
Morrison
Sent: Thursday, March 20, 2008 10:06 AM
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: