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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 mu
by 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 agoI 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 agoThe 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".