Future Time References: An Analysis of WILL and SHALL based on the Chemnitz Translation Corpus

Susan Jähn

• Publisher: GRIN Verlag
• Year: 2005
• Edition: 0
• eBook ISBN:
  9783638417181
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1, 3, Technical University of Chemnitz, course: Hauptseminar Contrastive Grammar, language: English, abstract: It appears obvious that everything happening before the present moment belongs to the past and all events following now refer to the future. Additionally, Quirk points out that there is no morphological future form in English. While, for example, -edis added to regular verbs in order to form the Simple Past and-sis added in order to form the 3rdperson singular in the Simple Present Tense, there is no such rule for the future time in English. Consequently, future time is not formed by verb inflection. Therefore, according to Quirk there is no future tense in English. However, linguists and teachers argue about this problem and thus two main views can be distinguished (Quirk 1985: 176): a) As already mentioned tense can only be achieved by verb inflection. Hence, English has no future tense.b) A future reference can be achieved by using an auxiliary verb construction, such aswill+ infinitive, for example. It appears evident that despite the fact that English has no future tense, it must be capable of expressing future time, namely by the use of auxiliaries.According to Quirk (1985: 120)auxiliariescan be divided into primary verbs (be, have, do)or modal verbs (can, may, will, shall, could, might, would, should, must).The latter category is also calledmodal auxiliaries.As it was already indicated above, modal auxiliaries, especiallywillandshall, play an important role in terms of future time in English. For that reason, this term paper deals with an analysis of the modal auxiliarieswillandshalland their future time reference. This analysis is based on the Chemnitz Translation Corpus of the Chemnitz Internet Grammar.1Barnbrook (1996: 168) defines acorpusas "a collection of texts, selected to represent a particular type of language and held incomputer-readableform". The Chemnitz Translation Corpus consists of four main types of texts: policy documents, academic writing, tourist brochuresand ofpolitical and public speeches.All example sentences for the analysis ofwillandshallwhich appear in this paper were taken from this corpus and by that, from the above-mentioned types of text.2By analysing a lot of example sentences with different contexts, i. e. for example biblical, political or tourist backgrounds, the aim of this paper is to find hypotheses for future or non-future uses ofwillandshalland by that, to develop grammar rules.