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> English has no inflected future tense like Latin and Romance languages. In linguistics, “tense” refers generally to how a verb is inflected English has no in

by vorg 8y ago

> English has no inflected future tense like Latin and Romance languages. In linguistics, “tense” refers generally to how a verb is inflected English has no inflected future tense because of the way words are usually defined. Verbs in English only have 4 types of inflections because words are defined as whatever is surrounded by spaces in writing. If we define words as the unit that carries a single beat in speaking, so "He is-to-see-it tomorrow" is 3 words, then verbs also have prefixed inflections. English then does have an inflected future tense. The "is to" future form isn't mentioned in discussions on future tense very often but seems to have the most predetermination, whereas "is going to" and "will" indicate more volition by the doer.

foldr 8y ago
No, it isn't just a matter of orthography. English has no future tense on any reasonable analysis. There is no unit of English syntax which (i) behaves like a verb and (ii) has a distinct future form. This is a completely uncontroversial point. See e.g. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=897 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=897 for further discussion. > If we define words as the unit that carries a single beat in speaking Note that this definition clearly won't do what you want it to do (even ignoring the imprecision of "single beat"), as the units you want to treat as verbs can be separated to an arbitrary degree. E.g. "Is he really, in your opinion, to see her tomorrow?"
- vorg 8y ago
  > There is no unit of English syntax which [...] Here you're defining syntax around your orthographic definition of what a word is. > "Is he really, in your opinion, to see her tomorrow?" The opinion words "really" and "in your opinion" added into that syntactic structure parallel the manner that opinion word "bloody" is added into a lexical structure to become "abso-bloody-lutely".
  - foldr 8y ago
    >Here you're defining syntax around your orthographic definition of what a word is. No, I'm not. As I said, there is no unit in English (regardless of whether or not it is written as a single word) that both behaves like a verb and has a distinct future form. >The opinion words "really" and "in your opinion" added into that syntactic structure parallel the manner that opinion word "bloody" is added into a lexical structure to become "abso-bloody-lutely". You seem to have missed that fact that even if you remove "really" and "in your opinion", the unit you identified as a verb is still broken up in the example I gave. In "Is he to see her tomorrow?", "is-to-see" is not a contiguous unit. Although the idea of treating the subject pronoun as a verbal infix might be charming (English as Mohawk!), the subject could be a much larger phrase, as in e.g. "Is the man in the red hat to see her tomorrow?" It is simply not true that adjunction of adverbials has the same properties as expletive infixation. Even if there is some loose analogy between these two processes, I fail to see how it's relevant to units defined in terms of a single "beat in speaking".
    - vorg 8y ago
      > "is-to-see" is not a contiguous unit You can insert stuff between "is" and "to-see" (and between "to" and "see", I hope you agree) because English mostly parses into left-branching trees, which is the only reason why you can't insert stuff between "see" and "-ing". Natural languages don't liberally mix left-branching structures and right-branching ones because they're hard for people to understand. E.g. Pinker's "The rapidity that the motion that the wing that the hummingbird has has has is remarkable" is grammatically correct but not easily understandable. The contiguity or lack of it operates on a different conceptual plane to whether a "word" can be inflected or not. > loose analogy To take some example language from your reply, some people speak this as two words, others (e.g. some Americans) as a compound word. Because the concept of a word is not well defined, the boundary between morphology and syntax is blurred. Putting "is" and "to" noncontiguously before a verb is the same as putting "-ed" after a verb. They are both "inflections".
      - foldr 8y ago
        Look, if you have a totally radical reanalysis of English syntax according to which "is...to" can function as some kind of discontinuous inflectional affix, I wish you luck developing that. It's clearly thousands of miles away from being a generally accepted analysis of English syntax. So unless you've written up your analysis in detail somewhere, there's not much further to discuss.
- gizmo686 8y ago
  There is a standard analysis of English in generative grammar where verbs and tense are are seperate nodes at deep structure [0], and we get inflected verbs through some form of V-T movement [0]. Under this analysis, English clearly has a future tense. It just gets pronounced as its own word (will) instead instead of being involved in V-T movement. A more popular analysis is to replace "T" with "I", and do everything I talked about above. (The question here is really if other features share a d structure node with tense or if they all have their own functional nodes. I haven't seen a clear argument either way) Edit: not clearly. There are still some additional assumptions to make with no clear evidence either way (notably, the category of "will"), and the definition of "tense" is a amnigous. [0] English's rules for V-T movemement are relativly complicated compared to most languages
  - foldr 8y ago
    >There is a standard analysis of English in generative grammar where verbs and tense are are seperate nodes at deep structure Yes, there is. >Under this analysis, English clearly has a future tense. No, this does not follow. You can just as easily (and more correctly) analyze "will" as a modal auxiliary like "can" or "would". Supposing it's true that "will" is the daughter of I/T/whatever, it doesn't follow that the I/T/whatever head has to have a future tense feature. You could argue, and some people have, that at some level, the interpretation of "will" involves future tense in some semantic sense, which conceivably might be realized as a feature on a head somewhere in the inflectional spine of the tree. But that tense feature would not have the same kind of straightforward syntactic and morphological motivation as e.g. the +past feature does in English. In the context of a general audience, this isn't a notion of "tense" that's relevant. After all, in this highly abstract sense, even a language such as Chinese might have tense. FWIW I have a PhD in (generative) syntax. I'm don't think that any generative syntactician addressing a general audience would describe English as having a future tense.
    - gizmo686 8y ago
      I just have an undergrad degree in linguistics. I am looking at this question from the perspective of x-bar theory, and defining "tense" as as a feature of the syntactic catagory that populates the populates the "T" node at deep structure (or a feature of the I catagory). [0]. As I alluded to in my comment, I have never seen a convincing arguement in either direction for wheather "will" is a T or a V; and this was an active discussion in my syntax class about 3 years ago where the proffesor (a syntaxtician) had also said that she never saw a compelling arguement either way. If you know of one, please sharer. Edit: I think you edited your post after I responded. I would argue that all languages have the same featureset (including tense) at d structure, but that is going far afield. Edit2: there is also a notion of tense at the sementic level. And English seems to offer a gramaticalized way of providing the sementic future tense, regardless of how you look at the corresponding syntax/morphology. If we accept that "will" is a syntactic "T" and carries a sementic meaning of "future" then how is it unreasonable to call it a future tense? Sure, there are debatable parts to the above assumptions, but it is a stretch to say that no analysis has future tense. Heck, there is a universal grammar analysis that would say English (and Chinese) has all the tenses, and the only question is which ones surface as distinct pronounciations. [0] This leads to a notationally weird case where "to" is a tense with a -tense feature.
- DFHippie 8y ago
  > There is no unit of English syntax which (i) behaves like a verb and (ii) has a distinct future form. This seems like an arbitrary and peculiar way to define tense specifically to exclude periphrastic languages like English. If these are the rules by which we are arguing, the argument doesn't seem that interesting. By this argument colloquial French and German have no past tense because they use periphrastic constructions to expression this distinction.
  - foldr 8y ago
    It is indeed the case that (spoken) French and German have no past tense, strictly speaking. (I don't speak German, so I don't know to exactly what extent the German imperfect is unused in everyday speech. I think it may not be as unused as the passé simple in French.) Tense is a piece of technical terminology with a particular definition. There's nothing very peculiar about the definition that I can see. The definition denies English a future tense because English doesn't have periphrastic units which (i) behave like verbs and (ii) have a distinct future form. For whatever reason, people are really resistant to taking linguists' word for it on what technical terms within linguistics mean. You don't find people on here trying to argue with physicists about whether they should maybe adopt a different definition of "force" or "mass" or "electron".
    - DFHippie 8y ago
      It's not a question of taking linguists' word for it. It's a question of taking particular linguists' word for it. The discussion in that language log is interesting. You will notice that it isn't simply people calling "amen". Certain things are settled: "will" in English behaves like other English auxiliary verb (setting aside those cases where it doesn't, as in contractions). Saying "English has no future tense", though, is settled only within the confines of a particular linguistic model with a particular technical definition of the term "tense", of which there are many.
      - foldr 8y ago
        >is settled only within the confines of a particular linguistic model with a particular technical definition of the term "tense", of which there are many. Could you then provide a reference to a linguist arguing that English has a future tense (in the usual syntactic/morphological sense of the term)? I'm baffled by the reference to the "confines of a particular linguistic model". Linguists who can agree on hardly anything else (and linguists are pretty good at disagreeing!) can agree that English lacks a future tense.

by vorg 8y ago

foldr 8y ago

No, it isn't just a matter of orthography. English has no future tense on any reasonable analysis. There is no unit of English syntax which (i) behaves like a verb and (ii) has a distinct future form. This is a completely uncontroversial point. See e.g. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=897 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=897 for further discussion. > If we define words as the unit that carries a single beat in speaking Note that this definition clearly won't do what you want it to do (even ignoring the imprecision of "single beat"), as the units you want to treat as verbs can be separated to an arbitrary degree. E.g. "Is he really, in your opinion, to see her tomorrow?"

vorg 8y ago
> There is no unit of English syntax which [...] Here you're defining syntax around your orthographic definition of what a word is. > "Is he really, in your opinion, to see her tomorrow?" The opinion words "really" and "in your opinion" added into that syntactic structure parallel the manner that opinion word "bloody" is added into a lexical structure to become "abso-bloody-lutely".
- foldr 8y ago
  >Here you're defining syntax around your orthographic definition of what a word is. No, I'm not. As I said, there is no unit in English (regardless of whether or not it is written as a single word) that both behaves like a verb and has a distinct future form. >The opinion words "really" and "in your opinion" added into that syntactic structure parallel the manner that opinion word "bloody" is added into a lexical structure to become "abso-bloody-lutely". You seem to have missed that fact that even if you remove "really" and "in your opinion", the unit you identified as a verb is still broken up in the example I gave. In "Is he to see her tomorrow?", "is-to-see" is not a contiguous unit. Although the idea of treating the subject pronoun as a verbal infix might be charming (English as Mohawk!), the subject could be a much larger phrase, as in e.g. "Is the man in the red hat to see her tomorrow?" It is simply not true that adjunction of adverbials has the same properties as expletive infixation. Even if there is some loose analogy between these two processes, I fail to see how it's relevant to units defined in terms of a single "beat in speaking".
  - vorg 8y ago
    > "is-to-see" is not a contiguous unit You can insert stuff between "is" and "to-see" (and between "to" and "see", I hope you agree) because English mostly parses into left-branching trees, which is the only reason why you can't insert stuff between "see" and "-ing". Natural languages don't liberally mix left-branching structures and right-branching ones because they're hard for people to understand. E.g. Pinker's "The rapidity that the motion that the wing that the hummingbird has has has is remarkable" is grammatically correct but not easily understandable. The contiguity or lack of it operates on a different conceptual plane to whether a "word" can be inflected or not. > loose analogy To take some example language from your reply, some people speak this as two words, others (e.g. some Americans) as a compound word. Because the concept of a word is not well defined, the boundary between morphology and syntax is blurred. Putting "is" and "to" noncontiguously before a verb is the same as putting "-ed" after a verb. They are both "inflections".
    - foldr 8y ago
      Look, if you have a totally radical reanalysis of English syntax according to which "is...to" can function as some kind of discontinuous inflectional affix, I wish you luck developing that. It's clearly thousands of miles away from being a generally accepted analysis of English syntax. So unless you've written up your analysis in detail somewhere, there's not much further to discuss.
gizmo686 8y ago
There is a standard analysis of English in generative grammar where verbs and tense are are seperate nodes at deep structure [0], and we get inflected verbs through some form of V-T movement [0]. Under this analysis, English clearly has a future tense. It just gets pronounced as its own word (will) instead instead of being involved in V-T movement. A more popular analysis is to replace "T" with "I", and do everything I talked about above. (The question here is really if other features share a d structure node with tense or if they all have their own functional nodes. I haven't seen a clear argument either way) Edit: not clearly. There are still some additional assumptions to make with no clear evidence either way (notably, the category of "will"), and the definition of "tense" is a amnigous. [0] English's rules for V-T movemement are relativly complicated compared to most languages
- foldr 8y ago
  >There is a standard analysis of English in generative grammar where verbs and tense are are seperate nodes at deep structure Yes, there is. >Under this analysis, English clearly has a future tense. No, this does not follow. You can just as easily (and more correctly) analyze "will" as a modal auxiliary like "can" or "would". Supposing it's true that "will" is the daughter of I/T/whatever, it doesn't follow that the I/T/whatever head has to have a future tense feature. You could argue, and some people have, that at some level, the interpretation of "will" involves future tense in some semantic sense, which conceivably might be realized as a feature on a head somewhere in the inflectional spine of the tree. But that tense feature would not have the same kind of straightforward syntactic and morphological motivation as e.g. the +past feature does in English. In the context of a general audience, this isn't a notion of "tense" that's relevant. After all, in this highly abstract sense, even a language such as Chinese might have tense. FWIW I have a PhD in (generative) syntax. I'm don't think that any generative syntactician addressing a general audience would describe English as having a future tense.
  - gizmo686 8y ago
    I just have an undergrad degree in linguistics. I am looking at this question from the perspective of x-bar theory, and defining "tense" as as a feature of the syntactic catagory that populates the populates the "T" node at deep structure (or a feature of the I catagory). [0]. As I alluded to in my comment, I have never seen a convincing arguement in either direction for wheather "will" is a T or a V; and this was an active discussion in my syntax class about 3 years ago where the proffesor (a syntaxtician) had also said that she never saw a compelling arguement either way. If you know of one, please sharer. Edit: I think you edited your post after I responded. I would argue that all languages have the same featureset (including tense) at d structure, but that is going far afield. Edit2: there is also a notion of tense at the sementic level. And English seems to offer a gramaticalized way of providing the sementic future tense, regardless of how you look at the corresponding syntax/morphology. If we accept that "will" is a syntactic "T" and carries a sementic meaning of "future" then how is it unreasonable to call it a future tense? Sure, there are debatable parts to the above assumptions, but it is a stretch to say that no analysis has future tense. Heck, there is a universal grammar analysis that would say English (and Chinese) has all the tenses, and the only question is which ones surface as distinct pronounciations. [0] This leads to a notationally weird case where "to" is a tense with a -tense feature.
DFHippie 8y ago
> There is no unit of English syntax which (i) behaves like a verb and (ii) has a distinct future form. This seems like an arbitrary and peculiar way to define tense specifically to exclude periphrastic languages like English. If these are the rules by which we are arguing, the argument doesn't seem that interesting. By this argument colloquial French and German have no past tense because they use periphrastic constructions to expression this distinction.
- foldr 8y ago
  It is indeed the case that (spoken) French and German have no past tense, strictly speaking. (I don't speak German, so I don't know to exactly what extent the German imperfect is unused in everyday speech. I think it may not be as unused as the passé simple in French.) Tense is a piece of technical terminology with a particular definition. There's nothing very peculiar about the definition that I can see. The definition denies English a future tense because English doesn't have periphrastic units which (i) behave like verbs and (ii) have a distinct future form. For whatever reason, people are really resistant to taking linguists' word for it on what technical terms within linguistics mean. You don't find people on here trying to argue with physicists about whether they should maybe adopt a different definition of "force" or "mass" or "electron".
  - DFHippie 8y ago
    It's not a question of taking linguists' word for it. It's a question of taking particular linguists' word for it. The discussion in that language log is interesting. You will notice that it isn't simply people calling "amen". Certain things are settled: "will" in English behaves like other English auxiliary verb (setting aside those cases where it doesn't, as in contractions). Saying "English has no future tense", though, is settled only within the confines of a particular linguistic model with a particular technical definition of the term "tense", of which there are many.
    - foldr 8y ago
      >is settled only within the confines of a particular linguistic model with a particular technical definition of the term "tense", of which there are many. Could you then provide a reference to a linguist arguing that English has a future tense (in the usual syntactic/morphological sense of the term)? I'm baffled by the reference to the "confines of a particular linguistic model". Linguists who can agree on hardly anything else (and linguists are pretty good at disagreeing!) can agree that English lacks a future tense.