Simple Future Tense

10 Key excerpts on "Simple Future Tense"

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  Academic Writing in Context

  Implications and Applications

  • Martin Hewings(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Continuum

    (Publisher)

  These standard grammars usually also mention the possibility of using the present progressive or present simple tense in some contexts. Other future indicators mentioned are be about to, be on the point of, and Palmer (1979: 48) makes the point that modals such as can are sometimes used to express futurity. Frequency analyses of verb tenses can be of little help in understanding the function of these tenses in text. Some early analysis of tenses in academic texts demonstrated that verbs in the present simple tense far outnumber other tenses and that the will+infimtivefom (until recently called 'the future tense' in most pedagogic grammars) is relatively rare at about 3 per cent of the total number of verb phrases (see, for example, Barber 1962; Wingard 1981). Such 184 ACADEMIC WRITING IN CONTEXT analysis might appear at first to support the view that we need not take the expression of future events too seriously in the teaching of EAR However, as we attempt to show here, the expression of futurity, in academic writing as in newspapers, is not limited to the use of shall and mil. We find a variety of types of verbal group, including present tense verbs and infinitive forms, and a range of associated lexical items, such as threat and set for in the headlines cited above. In their discussion of 'key grammatical forms' for ESP teaching, Dudley-Evans and St John (1998:75), referring to the high frequency of present tense forms, stress the need to consider the distribution of tenses across genres and sub-genres. Their point is that, for teaching purposes, it is not enough to know the frequency of a grammatical form; we need to consider the use of the form in its rhetorical and discourse context. That is to say, we need to know what notions are realised by the present tense forms and what rhetor-ical functions they help to fulfil. Prediction and forecasting are not genres as such but rather rhetorical functions appearing in certain genres.

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  Functional Semantics

  A Theory of Meaning, Structure and Tense in English

  • Peter Harder(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  The future 349 2.3. The future 2.3.1. Semantic description In discussing the meaning of the future I am not taking for granted that English has a structurally clear-cut future tense. The point-blank question of whether English has a future tense (cf., e.g., Davidsen-Nielsen 1988) only has an answer if we are quite sure precisely what a future tense is; and since the overarching category of tense does not obviously constitute a well-defined natural kind (cf. Bybee—Dahl 1989), that is not guaranteed to be the case. In approaching the issue I begin by discussing the temporal meaning that I see as defining for a pure future. As opposed to the deictic tenses discussed above, where I could take my point of departure in fairly uncontroversial structural elements in the grammar of English, the discussion of the future thus starts off as a discussion in terms of content substance only. However, I hope to show that the type of meaning I am after has a central status not only in relation to the cross-linguistic substance discussion, but also in relation to English. Futurity is an aspect of the meaning of a great many signs and con-structions: adjectives like imminent, nouns like destiny, verbs like become, etc. In homing in on the special status of the future in a verbal context, a central lexical class is that of verbs like plan or want whose complements are understood as awaiting future realization. As part of what such verbs do, they thus assign futurity to clauses that occur as their direct objects. This shared feature itself, abstracted from all indications of how it is to come about — i.e. abstracted from the rest of the content of these verbs — is what I understand by pure future. My paraphrase is the following: (70) The 'pure future' indicates that the state-of-affairs applies to some situation ahead in time (time F for future) An obvious path whereby a marker of pure future may arise is through a process of bleaching (cf. below).

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  Relative Tense and Aspectual Values in Tibetan Languages

  A Comparative Study

  • Bettina Zeisler(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  In present time context, the situation of communication is rather backgrounded by the Simple Present/Future while the event-as-such, the reason or manner of its occurrence, or its emotional content is fore-grounded. In past time context, the Simple Present/Future may likewise 3.4 Present stem and present tense forms in past time context 371 have a contrastive foregrounding function, but it may also have a more descriptive, introducing, or resuming character. In this case, it still pre-sents the event-as-such without establishing a direct temporal relation to another event, but pragmatically it backgrounds a whole situation as a narrative frame in contrast to the main plot of the narration. This prag-matic function may be compared to the explicative and resuming func-tion of the French Imparfait (see again the discussion following example (57), section 1.4.2.2 above). While the Compound Present/Future in past time context back-grounds an event in relation to an immediately intersecting and much more relevant event without violating the narrative theme-rheme struc-ture, the Simple Present/Future marks the step into and out of the narra-tive line as well as side steps or inversions of order. In examples (271) and (273) the Simple Present/Future can thus be explained as resuming the outcome of the preceding phrases. The resuming function might perhaps be bound to verb semantics, and thus might be more frequent with particular verbs than with others. This pragmatic distinction that holds also for derived non-finite forms can be nicely illustrated by the following example. In (274a), the Simple Present/Future in line 3 marks the general situation as observed by Hanumanta: Sita being guarded by the demon's army. And this situation is further elaborated with background information in lines 4 and 5 before, in line 6, the main story is resumed.

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  Grammar and Meaning

  A Semantic Approach to English Grammar

  • Howard Jackson(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  be about to followed by the base form of the main verb (example at [17]). A further example follows at [63].

  [63] What I am about to relate passed in a series of flashes [M03: 74]

    In addition to these expressions specifically relating to the future (will, be going to, be about to ), we also find the simple present and the present progressive being used with future reference. With these forms, the fact that the future is being referred to is indicated either by the general context or by the presence of an appropriate Temporal circumstance.

  [64] When I wake up tomorrow let me remember my real name [N25: 58]

  [65] Tonight I am flying back to Rome [N22: 113]

  The simple present with future reference is said to have overtones of ‘definiteness’. One of its common uses is in timetable announcements:

  [66] The train for Newcastle departs from Platform 5 at 10.25

  The present progressive is said to have overtones of ‘future arising from present arrangement or plan’. This expression of the future may combine with will to give a form that has overtones of ‘future as a matter of course’ (see examples at [29] and [67]).

  [67] I'll be joining you in a minute or two [P01: 109]

  The future action or event is seen as happening in the normal course of events.

  Past in past

  There are two kinds of meanings associated with the notion of past-in-the-past time, both of which relate to a past point of orientation and both of which are expressed by the same periphrastic verb form — the past perfective. The first kind of meaning relates to the ordering of events relative to each other in past time: one event can be indicated (by means of the past perfective) as occurring prior to another (expressed by the simple past), as in the examples at [31] and [68]:

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  Meaning and the English Verb

  • Geoffrey N. Leech(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  5 ). The parallelisms between what can be expressed by the Present Tense and by the Past Tense divide the sphere of temporal reference into two broad semantic time zones – the past and the non-past, as already suggested in our discussion in the Introduction. But in exploring the relation between grammar and meaning, as in other areas of specialist knowledge, it is generally better to stick with the familiar terms – knowing their deficiencies – rather than to seek out unfamiliar ones. This means sticking with Present and Past, rather than the less familiar terms such as ‘non-past’ and ‘preterite’.

  In all uses of the Present Tense, after all, there is a basic association with the present moment of time (the moment of speech). This association can be expressed as follows: ‘The state or event has psychological being at the present moment’. It does not (as we see in §§14 –17 ) exclude the possibility of the Present Tense having actual reference to a time other than the present. The Present Tense in special circumstances can refer to past and to future time exclusive of present time. In the ‘historic present’, it represents past events as if they were happening now. In the ‘futurate present’, it refers to future events regarded as already planned or predetermined.

  We can start, however, with the more usual application of the Present Tense to present time – limiting discussion in this chapter to the Simple Present and Past Tenses. Simple Present: ‘state’ use 7

  The ‘STATE ’ use of the Simple Present is found with verbs expressing a temporally stable state of affairs. It is also called ‘unrestrictive’ because it places no limitation on the extension of the state into past and future time:

  Honesty is the best policy. | War solves no problems. | How many languages does he know? | They live in Washington. | I don’t have a TV.

  However, limits to the duration of the state may be implied by an adverbial expression which underlines the ‘presentness’ of the period in question, so indicating a contrast with some other period:

  Crime is the best policy these days. | War no longer solves any problems. | At present they live in Washington. | Just now

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  Concise Encyclopedia of Semantics

  • Keith Allan(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Elsevier Science

    (Publisher)

  In gen-eral, the future tense is less stable as a grammatical category than the past tense; it is often expressed periphrastically. Many languages make additional grammaticalized distinctions within the past or future based on the amount of time separating E and U, that is, the degree of remoteness between them. For instance, in Cocama (Cocama-Cocamilla), a language of Peru, three de-grees of remoteness are distinguished in the past, as shown in (3). (3a) ritama-ca tuts-ui town-to go-PAST 1 ‘I went to town today’ (3b) ritama-ca tutsu-icua ´ town-to go-PAST 2 ‘I went to town yesterday/a few days ago’ (3c) ritama-ca tutsu-tsuri town-to go-PAST 3 ‘I went to town a long time ago’ Tenses characterized by different degrees of re-moteness are rather rare in European languages but widespread among languages of sub-Saharan Africa, Australia, New Guinea, and many parts of the Americas. A two-way distinction is the most wide-spread, although up to a five-way distinction has been reliably reported for some languages. Some languages have divisions based on the daily cycle, in particular concerning the past, the most common cut-off point being today versus previous days (hodernial vs. pre-hodernial past); but mostly the division is less specific (immediate vs. remote past or future). Another relevant parameter concerning the past or future is (in)definiteness. Some languages make a grammaticalized distinction between the definite and indefinite future, the former referring to a future event, the location of which is given by the context, whereas the latter is used when no specific future time is under consideration. And in English, among other languages, the choice between the simple past and the present perfect is partly governed by the same criteri-on; for example, (4a) differs from (4b) by indicating that the speaker has a specific past occasion or time in mind.

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  Webster's New World: Spanish Grammar Handbook

  • Gail Stein(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

    (Publisher)

  PART III SIMPLE TENSES The Present Tense

  The word tense derives from the Latin word meaning “time” and refers to changes in the form of a verb to indicate when the action takes place. The present tense , as shall be pointed out later, not only refers to present time events but to customary actions and to happenings that will take place in the future.

  The Present Tense of Regular Verbs

  The present tense of regular Spanish verbs expresses what the subject does now. There are three main families of regular verbs: those whose infinitives end in -ar, -er, and -ir . All regular verbs that fall within a specific family follow the same rules of conjugation.

  Conjugation

  Conjugation refers to the act of dropping the infinitive ending and adding an ending that appropriately indicates tense (past, present, or future), voice (active or passive), or mood (indicative, conditional, subjunctive, imperative, or infinitive) and number (singular or plural) and person (first, second, or third).

  To conjugate regular verbs in the present tense in Spanish, drop the infinitive ending and add the endings shown in bold in the following table: Regular Verb Conjugations Examples:

  Ellos hablan rápidamente.	They speak quickly.
  No como frutas.	I don’t eat fruit.
  ¿Vives en Acapulco.	Do you live in Acapulco?

  The Present Tense of Reflexive Verbs

  An -se attached to the infinitive of a verb indicates that the verb is reflexive—in other words, the subject is performing the action upon itself (for example, lavarse

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  Understanding Sentence Structure

  An Introduction to English Syntax

  • Christina Tortora(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  realis tense. As you can probably tell, the word “(ir)realis” is related to the word “real.”

  There are a few ways to express future tense in English. One is with the modal auxiliary verb will, as we can see in the following example:

  (22)	The professor of linguistics will grade the quizzes the day after tomorrow.

  There are other possible ways to express future tense, which I’ll discuss more in Chapter 9. For example:

  (23)	a.	The professor is going to grade the quizzes the day after tomorrow.
  b.	The professor is gonna grade the quizzes the day after tomorrow.
  c.	The professor is grading the quizzes the day after tomorrow.

  For now, however, I only want to point out that under the right syntactic circumstances, the alleged present tense verb can be used with a future interpretation. Consider in this regard the following:

  (24)	When Sue gets home from work tomorrow, Mary will cook a nice dinner.

  The verb gets in (24) is an embedded main verb. (Note that the matrix sentence in (24) is Mary will cook a nice dinner. See Chapter 5 , especially Section 5.4 , for a refresher on dependent clauses introduced by when.) Formally — that is, in terms of its form — we claim that gets is a “present form” because of the presence of verbal ‐s. Nevertheless, in (24) the interpretation of the event denoted by the verb gets is future: at the time of utterance of the sentence in (24), Sue has not yet arrived home from work.

  Here we thus see a present tense form being used with a future interpretation. Once again, we’re reminded that the labels we use for these forms (“present,” or “past”) don’t straightforwardly tell us everything about the range of possible meanings they can be associated with.

  8.2.1.2.2 Historical present

  Surprisingly, there are also contexts in which the present form can be used with a past interpretation. One of these uses is the historical present

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  Tense and Aspect in the Languages of Europe

  • Östen Dahl(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  The frequency of Spanish FTR devices in different sets of questionnaire examples FUTURE TENSE IR A CONSTRUCTION PRESENT TENSE OBL OPT TOT OBL OPT TOT OBL OPT TOT COGNITIVE 1 person intention 53 0 53 35 0 35 11 0 11 BASE 3 person intention 33 0 33 62 0 62 3 0 3 Prediction 72 2 74 12 2 14 8 0 8 REMOTE-Immediate 13 0 13 76 0 76 9 0 9 NESS “This evening” 45 0 45 30 0 30 22 0 22 “Tomorrow” 79 0 79 0 0 0 4 0 4 Distant 33 0 33 33 0 33 0 0 0 The grammar of future time reference in European languages 317 Summing up, the systems we have described here have several features that seem characteristic of grammaticalization in progress: (i) competition between an older, more grammaticalized and a younger, less grammaticalized construction; (ii) no ab-solute acceptability judgments; (iii) dependence on several factors, both stylistic and semantic; (iv) differences between written and spoken language. We seem to be rather far from the structuralist ideal of a system with neat oppositions and simple meaning correlates. 5. European future gram families In this section, I shall survey the different future gram families that characterize the languages spoken in Europe, or rather Europe excluding the non-Slavic-speaking parts of Russia and some other outlying parts like Malta and Turkey. The motivation for this delimitation is twofold: first, it makes sense from the areal-linguistic point of view; second, the available information above all about the Caucasian languages does not make it possible to map that region in sufficient detail. ‘Gram family’ is a somewhat vague term that I use for grams with related func-tions and diachronic sources that show up in genetically and/or geographically re-lated groups of languages. To take one example, constructions formed with a verb meaning ‘to go’, with uses sometimes referred to as ‘prospective’, show up in a num-ber of languages in Western Europe, both in the Germanic and the Romance group.

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  A Grammar of Hinuq

  • Diana Forker(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Simple Present The Simple Present has the suf fi x -o , with the allomorphs -yo (after stems ending with /i/, conjugation class 2) and -ho (after a stem-fi nal long vowel, conjugation class 4, and after a stem fi nal -r ). Most of the verbs with a stem-fi nal consonant (conjugation class 1) undergo lengthening of this consonant before the Simple Present suf fi x -o is attached (Section 7.2.2). The suf fi x of this tense is identi-cal to the Imperfective converb suf fi x (Section 7.7.2.9). The Simple Present has no morphological negative form. Instead, the negative form of the Compound Present is used (Section 7.5.2). Thus, the negative form of the Compound Present covers the meanings of the Simple Present as well as the meanings of the Com-pound Present. Simple tenses 207 The Simple Present is one of the most frequent tenses and occurs in a wide range of contexts. Since it is also employed when referring to future situations it might be better labeled non-past, but I stick to the traditional terminology. The most typical function of the Simple Present is the reference to events or states that hold at the time of speaking, (323a). When working with Dahl’s (1985) tense-aspect-mood questionnaire, the Simple Present was (together with the Compound Present) frequently employed by the speakers in typical present progressive contexts (323b). (323) a. le, hey me you. SG . ERG se what hay ì i there r-u : -ho? V -do-PRS ‘Hey, what are you doing there?’ (N) b. [A: I just talked to my brother on the phone. B: What he DO right now? A answers:] ha ì o-y he. OBL -ERG ka G at letter caxxo write. PRS ‘He is writing a letter.’ It can have future time reference, as for example in true predictions about upcoming events (324a), when forecasting a situation (324b), or when expressing conjectures, plans, or intentions (324c). The General tense is used in the same kind of future situations.

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