TJ,
    I will give a brief answer to some rich questions and hope others can
join in (I'm between activities at a conference.)Herb could probably
fill us in on how the present and past have evolved over time.
    "I drive to work" usually means "That's the way I usually get there."
    "I am driving to work" usually means it's happening now.
    If we want a more habitual meaning for past tense, we might use
"would" or "used to." "I would walk to school" means it was the usual
way to get there. "I walked to school" could accomplish that in
certain contexts, as in "I walked to school when the weather was warm"
or even "when I was young." That's a brief intro to ways the tenses
act a bit differently and therefor interact with aspect in somewhat
different ways as well.
    I'm not sure "will" adds more certainty in contrast to present tense,
but it sure adds more certainty in contrast to the other modals. "My
plane may leave" is one example. Both refer to an event that hasn't
happened yet, but one is certainly more certain than the other.
   Brad has said on a (huge) number of occasions that sentences like
"After I had finished the book, I returned it to the library" are
incorrect. I don't agree. If it means the same thing as "After I
finished the book, I returned it to the library," then his logic is
that "finished" is a past tense verb and someone is "putting had in
front of a past tense verb." (My apologies if I have misrepresented
it.)I was trying to say that the time relation between events is
handled in more ways than one and that there is often redundancy in the
system. It is meant to be an alternative explanation.

Craig


May I bail out of this discourse with a couple of observations:
> My understanding of psycholinguistics doesn't stretch far enough
> for me to see the cognitive different between past and present tenses.
>
> As to "My plane leaves " and "My plane will leave" the idea that
> "will"
> somehow supplies more certainty than the same sentence without it
> frankly baffles me. It seems to me that when grammarians dropped a
> useful
> term such as "future tense" has not improved anyone's understanding or
> teaching.
> The explanations that have been offered to explain why "will go"
> should not be
> thought of as a tense are very, very tenuous and require more verbiage
> and
> clearly produce more debate.  Clearly an old luddite such as I would
> simply say
> "future tense" in a K-12 class that dealt with the structure of the
> language.
>
> Brad's question is a good one.  What is the difference between "After
> I read the
> book, I returned it to the library" and "After I had read the book, I
> had returned
> it to the library"?
>
> tj
>
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