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It depends on how you define a tense. Strictly speaking, English has no morphological future tense, but some tense-aspect combinations are commonly referred to
by flobosg 6y ago
It depends on how you define a tense. Strictly speaking, English has no morphological future tense, but some tense-aspect combinations are commonly referred to as a “future tense”. In Spanish, unlike «haber», «estar» is not considered an auxiliary verb in conjugation and therefore the present continuous-ish construction is not treated as a proper tense or tense-aspect pair.
- leephillips 6y agoThere is something I’m not getting. If “I am talking” is the present continuous tense, why is «Estoy hablando» not the same tense? They seem to be exactly analogous: a verb for to be, conjugated, followed by the present participle.
- flobosg 6y agoI’m not a linguist, but here’s how I see it: They are analogous expressions, but as I mentioned, «estar» is not considered an auxiliary verb in Spanish conjugation. You only have «haber», while English has “to be”, “to have” and “to do”. So, technically, in English the expression is “conjugated form of auxiliary to be + gerund” while in Spanish it is defined as a paraphrasis composed of “conjugated form of to be + gerund”. Tomayto, tomahto.
- foldr 6y agoTo be clear, this is just a difference in the traditional grammatical terminology for each language. Linguistically speaking neither English nor Spanish has any such thing as a "present continuous tense". Of course, the exact linguistic notion of "tense" is not particularly relevant to most people learning a language. I'm not objecting to its broader use in the context of language learning.