Let me give an example of why I do not think that labels are necessarily important in language teaching. When I was taught Spanish some 45 years ago I was taught that when verbs were conjugated like this: me lavo te lavas se lava nos lavamos os

the question about why you consider shall/will the suitable candidate for the term "future tense" stands. I consider shall/will the suitable candidate for the term "future tense" because I believe there to be a general

Are you suggesting that it was ordinary language users - or those who do not know that cabbage, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts and kohl rabi are varieties of the same species, and that carrots and parsnips are not only different species, but in

Humans like to classify. Language itself is an act of classification. We can distinguish between informal and formal classifications. When we are cooking, rhubarb is a fruit and an aubergines is a vegetable. A botanist will disagree and insist

Why that and not "he may eat", "she is eating", "he is going to eat" and other combinations as future tenses. Because that is to confuse the future tense with means of expressing futurity. I think it is helpful to

I am ready to kiss it goodbye in some situations. I would never say: "Whom did you meet?", but I do use it after prepositions, though I am probably more likely to use the inverted form e.g. "Who by?" Anyway, I don't think G

I am the first to lament that the insights of linguistics do not have a wider circulation. However, when our blogger says that decades of linguistic analysis tell us that English has no future tense, all that it is saying is something like this:

Some would contrast compound forms such as "she will eat" with forms in other languages (e.g. "elle mangera"), and argue that the latter is an inflected form, and thus a genuine "future tense", whereas the former is

Some linguists insist that English has no future tense since there is no separate form of the verb for it. Ignoring that and assuming that verb forms with shall/will are a future tense, the problem is that (a) other ways are used to refer to the

I am not sure your German example is a good one. The indirect object can be expressed in English without a preposition: Give the man a medal. Give me it etc. More generally, I do not think it is the case at all that languages that use prepositions