English grammar - Roger Berry 2012

A5.3 The ‘future tense’
A5 Verbs and their forms
Section A. Introduction

Activity A5.3

So far we have seen two tenses: past and present. How many other tenses are there in English?

Activity A5.4

Look at the verb forms below. Which refer to future time? What is the difference in meaning between them? (i.e. what meaning do they have in addition to ’future’?)

1. You will do as you are told.

2. The train leaves in 15 minutes.

3. I’m seeing him tonight. I’ll tell him then.

4. They’re going to sell their house.

5. (knock on door) That’ll be Yoyo.

Not all of the forms above exclusively refer to the future. If we say it’s raining or it rains then the time reference is normally present or general. If we compare it’s going to rain with it’ll rain, in the latter, there is a personal element involved: promise or prediction, while the former suggests the speaker is looking at dark clouds.

So we can offer the following reasons why there is no future tense in English:

□ tense in English (present/past) is marked by inflections; if we wanted to ’invent’ a future tense we would need to take -ll and attach it to the end of verbs: ’it rain’ll’

□ will and shall grammatically belong with the modal auxiliaries (see B6)

□ will doesn’t always refer to future time, and when it does, there is always another meaning, e.g. prediction, command or promise

□ though will is very frequent, other forms have as good a claim to be a future tense, e.g. be going to. (See the reading in D5.)

Thus there are various ways of referring to future time in English, but nothing that can reasonably be called a future tense. And if will is not a marker of the future tense, then would is not a marker of a conditional tense. So what we are left with is two tenses: past and present.