4 ms·

Disclaimer: IANAL(inguist). Unlike school grammar, most linguists consider English tense as just present and past, or "non-past" and "past", to be precise. Th

Disclaimer: IANAL(inguist). Unlike school grammar, most linguists consider English tense as just present and past, or "non-past" and "past", to be precise. There are several arguments for that: * The auxiliary verbs "will" and "shall" don't behave like present/past tense markers ("-ed"), but behave more like "can", "may", "must", etc., which are grouped as verbs affecting modality. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_verb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_verb * More importantly, you can actually take the past tense of "will"! > He would frequently go out for dinner. Hard to tell what's its tense, if "will" marked the future tense. It's much cleaner to consider it as a past tense of the modal verb "will". * English does use present tense in many cases to denote an event in the future, e.g., "We depart at five a.m. tomorrow," or "When does it start today?" Contrast this with the past tense, where nobody says "We depart at five a.m. yesterday," or "When does it start last evening?"

Tainnor 4y ago
That just shows that English doesn't have an inflectional future, it doesn't show that it has no future tense. A tense being marked by a modal verb is not uncommon at all, German marks the future by means of the verb "werden", and French and Spanish also have an additional future (next to the inflectional one) using the auxiliary "to go" (e.g. "voy a comer"). The fact that future tense is not obligatory is also not an indication that it doesn't exist (again, it's the same situation as in German). Compare the sentence pair: "Every day at 6, I eat dinner" "Every day at 6, I will eat dinner" They have clearly different meanings, the second referring to something that will only start to happen in the future (which is why it's a bit hard to imagine a context in which the utterance makes sense). The first one refers to a habitual action that extends at least to the present moment.
int_19h 4y ago
> Hard to tell what's its tense, if "will" marked the future tense. It's much cleaner to consider it as a past tense of the modal verb "will". FWIW, when I learned English (as a foreign language) in school, this use of "would" would be referred to as future-in-the-past, and considered a distinct tense, along with present, past, and future.

Tainnor 4y ago

That just shows that English doesn't have an inflectional future, it doesn't show that it has no future tense. A tense being marked by a modal verb is not uncommon at all, German marks the future by means of the verb "werden", and French and Spanish also have an additional future (next to the inflectional one) using the auxiliary "to go" (e.g. "voy a comer"). The fact that future tense is not obligatory is also not an indication that it doesn't exist (again, it's the same situation as in German). Compare the sentence pair: "Every day at 6, I eat dinner" "Every day at 6, I will eat dinner" They have clearly different meanings, the second referring to something that will only start to happen in the future (which is why it's a bit hard to imagine a context in which the utterance makes sense). The first one refers to a habitual action that extends at least to the present moment.

int_19h 4y ago

> Hard to tell what's its tense, if "will" marked the future tense. It's much cleaner to consider it as a past tense of the modal verb "will". FWIW, when I learned English (as a foreign language) in school, this use of "would" would be referred to as future-in-the-past, and considered a distinct tense, along with present, past, and future.