![]() I think you may be taking things too literally, or choosing one aspect of a definition out of the expected context. That way both insiders and outsiders to the technical community of linguists would both know what is going on.Īs to your specific examples, the way you label them doesn't really correspond to what anybody else says, informally or formally. I think that a less misleading way for more pedantic people to express it would be to say that English has only two inflected tenses. 'Going to' is less definitely a grammatical marker, it might be more accurately and technically referred to as a periphrastic future. 'Will' is definitely a grammatical marker for future time. English can express future tense grammatically (with 'will'), but technically it doesn't 'have' a future tense (assuming that what is meant is 'future tense inflections'). That is, the verb form itself is modified rather than having extra words around it to convey the tense. "X has a Y tense" is technical terminology that means "The language X has verb forms that inflect for the Y tense". However, language scholars, that very small set of expert thinkers who tend see a lot more theoretically of English and also of other languages, use that phrasing differently. That's how most people, school teachers, newspaper editors, newspaper readers, most everybody thinks. It would be perverse to think otherwise both those sentences describe a situation that occurs in the future. Most everybody (within the monolingual English speaking community) thinks of "I will do that" or "I am going to do that" are unequivocally future tense. So you can go ahead and say confidently that English has future tense. for everyone except the most technical, and for them it doesn't have a future tense because they define "have a tense" in a non-intuitive way. Short answer: Yes, of course English has future tense. Question: Is it true that English has no future tense? These are just a couple of examples but I have looked at many examples of future tense usage and I do not believe there is a valid future tense in English grammar. ![]() This is invalid for the same reason as above: "are" determines that the tense is present, and then a non-present time period is appended. The tense is present because of "am", and the sentence can not be validly interpreted as it stands. This is as invalid as I am going to school yesterday. ![]() The tense is determined by "am", so the tense is present. Whether "going to the bathroom" means traveling to a bathroom or peeing in their pants is open to interpretation, but this does not affect the tense. The only valid interpretation of this sentence is that the speaker is currently going to the bathroom (in the present, right now). The usage seems to have been contracted in recent centuries, but "will" remains a noun and this seems to be the only grammatically-valid interpretation of this sentence. Strictly, this sentence refers to the writer's will in the present. I (have the/a) will to do my homework tomorrow. ![]() Here are some examples of sentences that I previously believed were future tense, but now believe are either present tense or invalid (broken) English grammar: Recently, I have started believing that there is no future tense in English grammar. I'm a native English speaker and I consider myself to have a very competent understanding of English grammar. ![]()
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