Talk:Future tense

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Italic text==Periphrasis== Could you explain why, as languages evolve, future tenses are usually substituted by periphrasis? Fear of the irrealis?

I'm not at all certain that there is a general rule that governs the replacement of future tenses. In western Romance, they seem to have been paraphrases at one time, but now are fully re-integrated, though their relationship to the infinitive and the verbs derived from habere are usually relatively transparent. The replacement of the Latin future with a paraphrase is likely to have been made necessary by phonetic changes in vulgar Latin, which made futures like amabit ambiguous to perfects like amavit. In Germanic, there isn't even a future tense per se in the Gothic language, so periphrasis is all we get.

But they are not that stable. You have forms like "voy a {verb}" in Spanish or gonna in English.

Elsewhere, there doesn't seem to be a trend to replacing them wholesale. In demotic Greek, the inherited future lives on. Don't know enough about Slavic to say, nor about non-Indo-European languages. -- Smerdis of Tlön 15:54, 27 Jan 2004 (UTC)

This is not true. It is a common tendency in all languages to replace synthetic forms with new periphrastic constructions, although it may take less time in some languages than in others. This is called "renewal". Romance languages are a good example: the Latin future morphemes are derived from an Indo-European lexical verb (I'm not sure which one though, possibly something with the meaning "have"), a process called grammaticalization. Later, the future construction is replaced by the construction verb + "habere" (renewal) - this construction is again grammaticalized as, for example, "chanterai" in French. However, there is a new tendency of renewal, namely the "aller" ("go") + verb construction.

The reason for such phenomena is that speakers have a tendency to use new expressive means in their sentences. Longer and periphrastic constructions have the effect of putting more emphasis on the grammatical function they express, so in "cantare habeo" more emphasis can be put on the fact that the action happens in the future than in "cantabim". Of course, this once unusual and pragmatically marked construction will at some point lose its characterics and become an ordinary constructions which replaces the old one. In this situation it is likely, although not necessary, that it is grammaticalized into an synthetic construction. Then, later, the same thing will happen again.83.76.80.235 (talk) 01:15, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Is there a specific exact need to use the term periphrasis when most users will have little enough Greek? Could we not use a term like circumlocution ? Latin, I know, but surely with far greater currency amongst users --Jatrius 23:06, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

It's not really clear that there is a lack of stability in future forms for either Spanish or English. be going to has been around since the 1400s as far as I know. It certainly isn't recent, and it isn't clear at all that it's toppling will. Although it is an open question as to what exactly the difference is between will and gonna, it is clear that they have differing distributions, i.e., they have different purposes in the language and therefore neither is necessarily edging the other out. Both are perfectly stable where they are. I suspect the situation is similar in Spanish. -- Anaphor 02:30, 28 August 2007 (UTC)

Italic text==Simple Future== Pardon me if i'm wrong, but as the will + verb construction requires the "will" auxillary, it is not a "simple" tense. Simple refers to tenses indicated without auxillies. is that not right?

What bothers me as that IT ISN'T EVEN A BLOODY TENSE! It is an 'aspect'. How can we get this changed? --JohnO 18:28, 7 November 2005 (UTC)

While I think that you're right in the sense that will and other modals aren't tense in the way that past/present are tenses, I don't think it's an egregious error to call it tense. And it certainly isn't aspect; aspect can either refer to progressive aspect or perfect aspect, or it can refer to aktionsart. -- Anaphor 02:30, 28 August 2007 (UTC)

The claim "that modern grammarians agree that English has no future tense" is misleading. There are no citations for this claim here. Few linguists would accept the claim that English future is not a true tense, or that English has no true future tense (as far as I know, some functionalists make this claim). Whether a tense is formed by inflection or auxiliaries is a matter of surface morphosyntax, not the underlying tense system itself; surface morphosyntax is not a strong argument for whether something is a syntactically valid tense. [kentlee7]

Actually, quite a few grammarians for over four centuries have been saying, or implying, that there is no future tense in English. John Wallis (1653): Nos duo tantum habemus tempora in quovis verbo, Praesens & Praeteritum imperfectum. (No future tense there!). John Brightland (1746: In English we have but two Times distinguish'd by the different Endings. Priestley (1761): Verbs have two tenses; the PRESENT TENSE [...] and the PRETER TENSE. Kruisinga (1931)does not explicitly commit himself; but he refers to a Present and Past Tense, never to a future Tense; Jespersen (1931): The English verb has only two tenses proper, distinguished by the form itself, namely the Present and the Preterit. Poutsma (1926): English has no special forms to represent a predication as belonging to a time-sphere subsequent to the moment of speaking or writing. Schibsbye (1970) implies that Past and Prsent are the only two tenses. Close (1975) argues that there may be five future 'tenses', but there is no justification for singling out WILL as the one future tense.Quirk et al (1985): [...] morphologically, English has no future form of the verb in addition to present and past forms. Chalker (1984): It has beeen noted that English has no future tenses [...] We have, however, plenty of ways of talking about the future.Yule (1998): English has two distinct tense forms, PRESENT and PAST. Celce-Murcia & Larsen-Freeman (1999) The expression "future tense" was regarded as a misnomer, since in English finite verb stems are not inflected to express future time.Parrott (2000) Some languages have a single 'future tense', whereas English uses a lot of different verb forms to refer to future time. So, there are enough citations. Many grammarians DO believe that there is no future tense in English. It is true that we could cite Lowth (1762), Murray (1795), Sweet (1898, Hornby (1954) Sinclair et al (1990) Declerck (2008)who feel that WILL does form a future tense, but they are in a minority. Gramorak (talk) 18:47, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

In languages other than English, such as Italian, the simple future is simple because only one word stands for "I will have gone" which is andro (the o is accented). In the infinitive "to go" it is andare. It is possible, therefore, that the reason English grammar books call this a simple tense is because of its derivation from other languages.

Combining the section on future perfect would not be the best option. As it is if someone is looking for future perfect he/she can find it easily. If it is combined, then the search engine must reflect the "future" tense when someone has searched for "future perfect." Or a disambiguation page would be necessary.

This seems a premature assertion to me - I still use "shall" for the first person - and few

User:Jatrius added "(Pejorative footnote alert) Note that some commentators, especially in England and following Chambers's 17th century grammar as well as the more authoritative but now, perhaps, stilted English authorities of style up to the early twentieth century from him.

Merger from future

I think it's pretty obvious the future tense section from future needs merging into here. Comments? Objections? Grandmasterka 02:53, 30 September 2006 (UTC)

I agree. Merge supported.--Boson 18:33, 13 October 2006 (UTC)

I, too, agree. It talks about grammar and not future as a concept in itself, therefore I support it. 2.7182V 04:45, 26 December 2006 (UTC)

Object: The two are different tenses. Merging for merge's sake is stupid. Since both are different grammatical tenses, it makes sense to have two seperate articles. Why, for instance, merge pluperfect and perfect tenses? Which are, after all, as similar as the future is to the future perfect. Lofty 11:40, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

Shall and should

IMO it's incorrect to list should as one of the auxiliary verbs used to form the future tense in English. Should is just a past of shall, though in the modern language it's not usually perceived as such, but rather as an auxiliary verb on its own. --195.1.232.18 00:39, 15 July 2007 (UTC)

Oops, that was actually me, forgot to log in. --X-Man 00:40, 15 July 2007 (UTC)

Some missing futures

Some missing future tense in English:

Be going to (or be gonna, used in almost every English dialect) for near future - This is borrowed from French, where it is recognized as a tense

I agree gonna should be added, although I'm fairly sure it wasn't borrowed from French. -- Anaphor 02:30, 28 August 2007 (UTC)

Might (used for uncertain future events - I challenge anyone to create a sentence where might does not indicate a future event or strength)

In answer to your challenge:

"Try as hard as she might, she could not pass a driving test."

Here "might" is the past of "may", the sentence meaning: "Try as hard as she allowed herself to try, she could not pass a driving test."

Moscowexile (talk) 13:04, 31 May 2009 (UTC)moscowexile

        -um... okay. He might have gone.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.131.49.199 (talk) 22:33, 11 December 2007 (UTC) 

Another couple of answers to the challenge of "might" expressing non-future meaning: There might be life on other planets. -Where's John? - I don't know. He might be in his office, or he might be stuck in traffic. I'm worried about my health. I think I might have cancer. These all express the speaker's degree of certainty about the possibilities: not very certain. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 142.177.70.18 (talk) 11:15, 27 June 2013 (UTC)

May is vague in many dialects, while shall is rarely used in many dialects, and is probably on its way out of the language (soon to go the way of "Whom)

Italic text== Shall vs. Will ==

Shortly after explaining that the will/shall distinction has never described common usage anywhere in the world, the article goes into a length discussion that makes this distinction at excruciating length (although at least it leaves out the joke about the

Undid rewrite

After looking at the current state of the article, and comparing it to the one before the rewrite, I have reverted it back to before the rewrite. The new version was entirely unreadable. The old version, with its alleged inaccuracy at least was readable and structured well. Gigs (talk) 01:14, 14 September 2009 (UTC)

English Language Problems

The box above the English language section is full of inaccuracies. The shall/will distinction is completely obsolete, this is true. But that the phrasal 'to be going to...' serves as a future tense is false. Whoever is responsible for that box has confused grammatical/syntactic tense with physical/real-world time. There are many languages that can use verbs in various tenses to express things of various and different 'temporallity'. The train leaves at 12:00 is an example of this. While the event spoken of is temporally futuristic, the tense used is not future. The tense used is simple present. While I believe a discussion on the usage of verb tenses for differing temporal tenses would be relevant, it is by no means a property of only English and would be better set in to a section of its own within the article. Remember, the article is about verb tense, not about time. The article as proposed, and even parts of it as written, confuses these distinctions and fails to explain how they interact, instead assuming that any and all clauses that discuss actions yet to happen are somehow in the future tense—they're not. Tense is a property of verb morphology. Time is a property of the physical world. Which one is this article about? Fixing is needed, but not in the ways proposed.Bearnfæder (talk) 17:17, 4 October 2009 (UTC)

I have removed that box. Could you suggest what remains that needs fixing? Gigs (talk) 16:33, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

About "shall"... isn't it not really used in America anymore? The article doesn't mention that. 70.23.227.81 (talk)

Slavic languages

No single word about future tense in Slavic languages.--94.189.134.120 (talk) 10:09, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

Hebrew

The section about Hebrew future tense is completely incorrect. Biblical Hebrew has two forms of expressing future. Mishnaic Hebrew (not mentioned at all) kept one of them. Modern Hebrew followed Mishnaic Hebrew in future tense usage.

The opinion that modern Hebrew is not a Semitic language is esoteric, and it completely irrelevant in this context, as modern Hebrew tenses are identical to the Mishnaic Hebrew tenses.

This section needs more sources (which I cannot provide) and examples in Hebrew (which I will try to provide).

Laugh Tough (talk) 21:42, 16 June 2017 (UTC)

"Literally"

Literally: "I become you tomorrow after the work call."

What kind of blatant nonsense is this? The German says nothing of the kind, neither literally nor otherwise.
If you insist on including this sort of nonsensical "literal" (rather: word-by-word) translation, please at least translate "werden" correctly with "will". --91.34.40.67 (talk) 18:27, 16 August 2019 (UTC)

I decided to correct that now; it's just too silly to have in a Wikipedia article.

Just wondering: Why do you feel you need to have these ridiculous "literal" translations in here anyway?

They are wrong in every sense of the word, they won't help language learners, and they certainly won't help clarify how the future tense works in German. --91.34.40.67 (talk) 21:34, 16 August 2019 (UTC)

Special German future

O.k., so there are some grammarians who have invented an "indicative uncertain future" and an "indicative certain future" for the German language. If that is so, why...

• ... aren't there any sources cited?
• ... don't the Germans know about it?

There is no mention of "ungewiss zukünftige Zeit" or "gewiss künftige Zeit" on the German Wikipedia, and I doubt that any modern-day German has ever heard about it.

There is a total of EIGHT Google results for "ungewiss zukünftige Zeit" (a book from 1767 and several Wikipedia mirrors), and FIVE Google results for "gewiss künftige Zeit" (books from 1752, 1759, 1791, 1796).

What German are you talking about in this article, 18th century German? --91.34.40.67 (talk) 18:51, 16 August 2019 (UTC)

Blanked sections

A lot of the content in the article has been unsourced for years, much of it added in the early days of Wikipedia when sourcing was lax or nonexistent. I've removed a good bit of it, which will allow the individual language sections to be added back, white meeting current standards of WP:Verifiability. Going forward, please make sure that all material added includes citations to reliable sources that back it up. If you see content that appears to be original research or is unsourced, feel free to remove it, per WP:V, along with an appropriate edit summary explaining why it's being removed. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 18:15, 17 March 2021 (UTC)

I don't agree with this approach. Wikipedia policy is WP:PRESERVE if the material is basically correct and appropriate to the article (except for WP:BLP), though of course the goal is to have WP:RS for everything.

Naturally, if the material seems dubious, irremediably garbled, or grossly redundant, it should go. --Macrakis (talk) 18:37, 17 March 2021 (UTC)

I didn't see that you had added this reply, until after I added this response to your comment on my Talk page. I won't repeat all of that here. I realize a large amount of content removal might be upsetting, but the fact is, that this article has had quite a lot of unsourced material for many years. But WP:Verifiability is core Wikipedia policy, and we can't simply ignore it. Even if a large removal might come as a shock, it's perfectly appropriate per policy. As far as WP:PRESERVE is concerned, absolutely, I'm all for it; but see its first sentence; can you source all that stuff? I can't. I left undisturbed any unsourced material that I personally know to be accurate (although that should be sourced as well, because other editors don't have to believe me just because I say it's accurate, and what's in my brain isn't verifiable; it's more or less the definition of original research, true or not). If you wish, you can roll back everything and I'll issue a formal WP:CHALLENGE here and then wait a month. Anything that's still unsourced then, I'll remove. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 19:04, 17 March 2021 (UTC)

I certainly agree that WP:V is central and we don't want junk material on WP. I have also removed hoax material that was many years old (e.g. -- it is depressing to see how much vandalism there is, and how long it takes to remove sometimes).

But my understanding of WP:PRESERVE is slightly different from yours. You remove material that you don't "know to be accurate". I remove material that I am pretty sure is inaccurate or otherwise of bad quality. If I am interested enough in the topic and have the time, I might do a few quick searches on Google Books or Google Scholar. If they confirm the material, I add a cite. If they contradict the material, I will remove it or tag it as dubious. If I don't have the interest or the time for this, I tag it as citation needed. What I don't do is remove material because it is simply missing a cite. --Macrakis (talk) 20:18, 17 March 2021 (UTC)