Mine (ABBYY Lingvo) allows both variants. But if you insist, I will use 'inflection' from now on.
Perhaps Palmer did use it, but why would you want to use what is regarded today as the alternant spelling, when we have the perfectly good dictionary-standard spelling; "inflection"?
We do the same in Ukrainian and Russian, but that's not the reason for us not to have future tenses. Note that in Ukrainian BOTH future tenses are inflectional.
[1] "England meets Germany in the World Cup final in July"
[2] "England will meet Germany in the World Cup final in July"
Besides, using a present tense for future actions is not for every context and every verb. Usually it's applied to nearest future. You won't say 'Do you pay me the money back?' when you mean 'Will you pay me the money back?'.
In general the approach you describe may make sense. Although personally I don't find it vital. The way you form your future forms was chosen occasionally. You might have been doing it through some inflection, say, '-dum' or '-tum' and it wouldn't affect the system at all.
no is not true
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How about the near future then?
AnonymousHow about the near future then?How about it? This thread is several pages long; to what are you referring?
"No serious grammarian or linguist today believes that English has a future tense."
That is only because serious grammarians have moved the goalposts and decided that the word "tense" does not mean what it used to. At least for languages like English, Latin and the Romance languages "tense" was always used to mean "form of the verb" and all forms of the verb in those languages carry with them some notion of time even if other notions such as aspect are also implied. A clear distinction was made between simple and compound tenses. Indeed the French talk about the "passé simple" and the "passé compsosé". However, it was suddenly decided that only simple tenses would be called tenses. If they wanted to distinguish between simple tenses and compound tenses other than by calling them by those names they should have come up with a new word to mean "simple tense".
To say that English has no future tense because (a) "will" does not always indicate the future and (b) the future can be expressed other than by using "will" is a nonsense if at the same time you insist that Spanish has a future tense. That ignores the fact that (a) the form described as the future tense in Spanish does not always indicate the future and (b) the future is not always indicated by that form.
If it is insisted that the past tense of "go" is "went" and nothing else, that leaves the anomaly that English has no past tense when the verb is negated or used interrogatively because you have to use "did".
Whilst no language should be described other than in its own terms and I accept that in the past English grammar tended to be described in terms of Latin grammar, the baby has been thrown out with the bath water. There is an unfortunate trend in modern linguistic analysis to concentrate on form at the expense of function. In a synthetic language like Latin there tends to be more of a correspondence between form and function than in an analytic language like English. English needs to be described in looser categories than Latin. I once read a book which characterised words like "small" as one thing because you could add "-er" and "-est" to them, but words like "miniscule" as another because you need to use "more" and "most". That totally ignores the fact that "small" and "miniscule" perform the same function and is as absurd as suggesting that Latin "mensa" and "dominus" should be classed as different parts of speech because they have different inflections.
That is only because serious grammarians have moved the goalposts and decided that the word "tense" does not mean what it used to. At least for languages like English, Latin and the Romance languages "tense" was always used to mean "form of the verb" and all forms of the verb in those languages carry with them some notion of time even if other notions such as aspect are also implied. A clear distinction was made between simple and compound tenses. Indeed the French talk about the "passé simple" and the "passé compsosé". However, it was suddenly decided that only simple tenses would be called tenses. If they wanted to distinguish between simple tenses and compound tenses other than by calling them by those names they should have come up with a new word to mean "simple tense".
To say that English has no future tense because (a) "will" does not always indicate the future and (b) the future can be expressed other than by using "will" is a nonsense if at the same time you insist that Spanish has a future tense. That ignores the fact that (a) the form described as the future tense in Spanish does not always indicate the future and (b) the future is not always indicated by that form.
If it is insisted that the past tense of "go" is "went" and nothing else, that leaves the anomaly that English has no past tense when the verb is negated or used interrogatively because you have to use "did".
Whilst no language should be described other than in its own terms and I accept that in the past English grammar tended to be described in terms of Latin grammar, the baby has been thrown out with the bath water. There is an unfortunate trend in modern linguistic analysis to concentrate on form at the expense of function. In a synthetic language like Latin there tends to be more of a correspondence between form and function than in an analytic language like English. English needs to be described in looser categories than Latin. I once read a book which characterised words like "small" as one thing because you could add "-er" and "-est" to them, but words like "miniscule" as another because you need to use "more" and "most". That totally ignores the fact that "small" and "miniscule" perform the same function and is as absurd as suggesting that Latin "mensa" and "dominus" should be classed as different parts of speech because they have different inflections.
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Present, past and future; this is the base.
Every tense has 4 types: Simple, Progressive, Perfect (Simple) and Perfect pregressive. For example: Present Simple, Past Perfect (Simple), Future Perfect Progressive and so on... So, If you have 3 basic forms, and 4 types for each, you get 12 tenses (4*3=12) . (It's important to know, that the Perfect (Simple) and the Perfect Progressive are very simulare, so some people don't consider the Perfect Progressive as a type of a tense. But actually, it's wrong...)
Present, past and future; this is the base.
Every tense has 4 types: Simple, Progressive, Perfect (Simple) and Perfect pregressive. For example: Present Simple, Past Perfect (Simple), Future Perfect Progressive and so on... So, If you have 3 basic forms, and 4 types for each, you get 12 tenses (4*3=12) . (It's important to know, that the Perfect (Simple) and the Perfect Progressive are very simulare, so some people don't consider the Perfect Progressive as a type of a tense. But actually, it's wrong...)
There is the FUTURE!!
Who said that the verb has to be cojugated? For example, if you take a language with no conjugations at all, just like Chinese, it doesn't mean that there arn't any tenses in Chinese...
So, If you want to build a Future Simple sentence in English, you just add WILL before the verb. (Pronoun + V1 + will + the rest).
As you can see, the FUTURE tense DOES exist!
Who said that the verb has to be cojugated? For example, if you take a language with no conjugations at all, just like Chinese, it doesn't mean that there arn't any tenses in Chinese...
So, If you want to build a Future Simple sentence in English, you just add WILL before the verb. (Pronoun + V1 + will + the rest).
As you can see, the FUTURE tense DOES exist!
AnonymousWho said that the verb has to be conjugated?The linguists!
Anonymousif you take a language with no conjugations at all, just like Chinese, it doesn't mean that there aren't any tenses in Chinese...Actually, it does. Concepts like past, present, and future are times, which are independent of any language but can be expressed in any language, whether through tenses or not. This is not the same as tenses, which depend on what you're calling 'conjugations', i.e., different forms of verbs.
CJ
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AnonymousAs you can see, the FUTURE tense DOES exist!No.
The modal 'will' is simply one way we speakers of English use to talk about the future.
Incidentally, 'will' frequently does not refer to the future.
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