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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

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.

foldr 8y ago
Putting "will" in T doesn't mean that T necessarily has to bear a future tense feature. It could e.g. have a present tense feature.
- gizmo686 8y ago
  Are you getting at the distinction between "will" being the T and "will" being the daughter of T? Regardless, under either analysis "will" would have just as much claim to being a tense as "run" has to being a verb. You can still argue over wheather there is a syntactic feature of future tense (which is a different question) which I have never seen a solid arguement for either way.
  - foldr 8y ago
    >Regardless, under either analysis "will" would have just as much claim to being a tense as "run" has to being a verb. If you're punning on "tense" to refer to a lexical category, then sure. But we're talking about tense in the sense of past, present and future. In many textbook analyses, lots of things go in T. For example, "can" and "might" go in T. It doesn't follow that, say, "I might go to the store" and "I can go to the store" have a different tense.
    - gizmo686 8y ago
      I would say that "I can/might go to the store" go to the store having different tenses is what we mean when we say "can" and "might" are lexixally T. Even restricting ourselves to the syntactic features, I have still never seen an arguement for or against English having a syntactic future tense feature that did not come down to UG, or a disagreement about which model is simpler, and neither side is convoluted enough for me to confidently invoke Occam's razor.
      - foldr 8y ago
        The two sentences have different words occupying the "T" head, but they don't have different tenses. What you're saying is just a pun on "tense".

foldr 8y ago

Putting "will" in T doesn't mean that T necessarily has to bear a future tense feature. It could e.g. have a present tense feature.

gizmo686 8y ago
Are you getting at the distinction between "will" being the T and "will" being the daughter of T? Regardless, under either analysis "will" would have just as much claim to being a tense as "run" has to being a verb. You can still argue over wheather there is a syntactic feature of future tense (which is a different question) which I have never seen a solid arguement for either way.
- foldr 8y ago
  >Regardless, under either analysis "will" would have just as much claim to being a tense as "run" has to being a verb. If you're punning on "tense" to refer to a lexical category, then sure. But we're talking about tense in the sense of past, present and future. In many textbook analyses, lots of things go in T. For example, "can" and "might" go in T. It doesn't follow that, say, "I might go to the store" and "I can go to the store" have a different tense.
  - gizmo686 8y ago
    I would say that "I can/might go to the store" go to the store having different tenses is what we mean when we say "can" and "might" are lexixally T. Even restricting ourselves to the syntactic features, I have still never seen an arguement for or against English having a syntactic future tense feature that did not come down to UG, or a disagreement about which model is simpler, and neither side is convoluted enough for me to confidently invoke Occam's razor.
    - foldr 8y ago
      The two sentences have different words occupying the "T" head, but they don't have different tenses. What you're saying is just a pun on "tense".