Beyond Time - Linguistics - University of California, Berkeley

(259) We’re eating turnips for dinner tomorrow.
(260) #It’s raining at dinnertime tomorrow.
In addition to being less frequently marked, future systems typically have fewer metric
distinctions than do corresponding past systems in the same language, as noted in 5.2.1.1.
Nurse also notes that future morphology is much less diachronically stable than past
morphology across Bantu (Nurse 2008:92-93).
Observations like these have led many to the conclusion that in the typical case, the
past, present, and future do not form a truly tripartite tense system. Instead, they argue,
the future should be seen as somehow “secondary” (see e.g. Fleischman 1982). On the
other hand, Dahl’s (1985) survey found that most languages have a future category. In fact,
more than 50% of sentences with future reference in the survey were given morphological
future marking, making future one of the “three categories that are most often marked
morphologically” (Dahl 1985:105). Still, even Dahl’s results indicate that future tense, unlike
past tense, is often not obligatorily marked. Thus, there is some imbalance between past
and future tenses.
This difference is often attributed to epistemic differences. The future inherently refers
to situations that have not yet been realized in the actual world; it deals with predictions
rather than certainties. As noted by Comrie (1985), it is uncommon to find grammatical
forms that refer to future time only and do not have some modal component. Sometimes
the modal uncertainty is overtly encoded: Namibian Totela, for example, marks future tense
with a ka- prefix and a subjunctive final vowel -e. With reference to the English Future,
Levinson suggests that counterexamples to claims of purely temporal semantics abound
(Levinson 1983:78). The future’s inherent modality has led to much controversy over the
basic semantics of future marking.
There have been two basic approaches to dealing with the modal semantics of the future.
The first (e.g. Partee 1973) argue that the English Future (‘will’) is not a future at all, but
a present-tense modal (e.g. ‘if you will’). That is, modal features of the future should be
considered primary, equal to or superceding any temporal elements.
The second approach recognizes the modal component, but argues that it is not primary,
and that the future should be recognized as a true tense. Comrie (1985), for example, argues
that there is evidence of pure future tense uses of English ‘will’.
In conditional protases (261), future time cannot be expressed with ‘will’; instead, the
present is used. However, ‘will’ is perfectly acceptable in the same context if it has a modal
(present or habitual) reading (262). Comrie argues that this contrast shows that ‘will’ has
two separate readings in English; one of these readings, he claims, can be described as a
distinct grammatical future tense category (Comrie 1985:48).
(261) If Marian gets (#will get) a grant, she will return to Goma. (future in protasis)
(262) If John will drink a chocolate milkshake with dinner, he will stay up all night.
(modal reading of conditional clause)
Similarly, Dahl argues that while the prototypical future tense has an element of intentionality,
the “essential semantic feature” is that of a prediction about future time. In
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